An Argument to Keep Some Form of The Affordable Health Care Act

When I worked as a VISTA volunteer 5 years ago I discovered some of the chicanery of the pre-existing condition business in America. There was a health care company that supposedly covered all volunteers and it was required to be presented at doctor’s appointments before presenting the state insurance by state law. They didn’t cover a thing because schizophrenia was a pre-existing condition but took $30 per appointment. So it was essentially legal robbery. The inability to have health insurance up until the system was changed had a big part with me ending up on SSI in the first place as the alternative was to be an indigent with the very expensive costs of American health care. I imagine many other VISTA volunteers went through the same bs. I know there’s many problems with Obamacare that need to be worked out but I’m glad the issue has at least been attempted to be addressed because not everyone who is diagnosed with some of the things that are labeled as pre-existing conditions should have to go on Medicaid or disability forever. While I will never be cured some people with mental illness do recover completely and deserve to have a normal life. I also think that some who recover reasonably well should also do the same. The new system is not perfect but I don’t think we should go back to the old system.

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Thanks @Blizzard I agree!

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What is VISTA?

Obamacare infuriates me because there’s numerous people that make too little money to qualify for the subsidies. Granted, this isn’t Obama’s fault, but the fault of the states that voted down medicare expansion due to ideological reasons.

VISTA (Volunteers In Service to America) is a program designed to give people in poverty or with disabilities to gain job skills. In my case they guessed that a future job was to make businesses “paperless” by putting old paperwork on computer screens. My heart broke later when my therapist was doing that job along with the other things he was doing and I discovered that every business in town had their regular employees do the job themselves. To be fair they tried and it was a good run but I have no marketable job skills and would have been better off using the scholarship I earned at a Tech School. rather than a History Associate’s degree (the main appeal there was that I was good at History and my father taught it at the Junior College I received the degree) but at the same time my state didn’t approve the Medicaid Expansion Law either. To be fair to my state the main reason given by the opposition is that after so many years of the federal government covering all the costs of the program the state would cover 10% which when you consider the cost of health care is not chump change. But yes distrust of the federal government is another factor and they are waiting for a “friendlier” party to control the Presidency. So that’s the full story there.

Private health care companies will seldom pay for massive medical problems, always seeking some loophole to get out of paying it. That is exactly what health insurance is most needed for. Private health insurance companies can’t be trusted to do the right thing - to do what is fair. The profit motive and their bottom line is all the care about. Because we can’t trust the private sector to provide adequate health care, we need to look to the government to do it. That is the best approach.

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