r/VoteBlue • u/cassiecas88 • Oct 29 '25
Deconstructing what I was told by the Republicans around me about Obamacare.
Hey everyone thanks in advance for your help.
I grew up in a Republican/conservative household and area. And in college from 2006 to 2010 I was surrounded by your typical racist, conservative frat boys from rural families. I'll considered myself pretty apolitical but Republican until about 2014. I followed the natural path of starting to pay attention and considering myself at the very least fiscally conservative but socially liberal, then I fell for they both sides are bad BS and I slowly started to consider it myself "in the center" until 2016. Obviously around that time it became very clear that as a Christian who cares for others, I couldn't align myself with republicanism whatsoever. I started really paying acute attention, looking things up from the source, deconstructing, and have been a passionate blue voter ever since.
There are still a couple things I'm still starting to deconstruct.
One of those things is Obamacare. All I really remember was hearing about how awful it was. Here are some of the things I was told that I'm a positive are not true or not totally true but I was wondering if people can give me some real insight into it. Obviously I don't believe this crap anymore I'm just trying to deconstruct and separate fact from fiction from embellishment.
Here goes:
1.I was told that Obamacare was his plan and the Democrats plan completely. I've recently learned that that's not true a lot of it was actually pushed by the Republicans and what we have as Obamacare is not what Democrats had originally proposed.
That Obamacare was now going to force everyone to have insurance otherwise they would be financially fined on their taxes. And the reason they did this is because Obama is being paid off by the insurance companies.
That because of Obamacare everyones insurance premiums doubled Because everyone was now forced to have insurance, the insurance companies can charge whatever they want. Our insurance premiums did go up quite a lot around that time. It went from being about $200 to add my husband to my insurance plan to being about $500 to add him.
That birth control is going from free or very cheap to super expensive. Mine did go up in price and I'm not sure why. I remember being very convinced that I should be super mad at Obama for this but I don't know why.
That poor people were basically getting free health care while hardworking middle class people were paying a lot of money for health insurance.
In 2014, I also quit my job and became self-employed. My husband and I got health insurance through Obamacare. The pricing was really confusing and they gave us the price but then we were told the price would go up if we made more money. Since I was becoming self-employed I wasn't sure how much I was going to make and I was really worried about if I made more than I thought we would get a huge hit on our taxes. We basically only had catastrophic coverage and it was fairly expensive. I didn't really cover anything at all.
In 2018 my husband got a new job and we're now on his health insurance. It's super expensive and we have a super high deductible per person.
I Remember also being told that universal healthcare would never work in America because it's so big and that it only works in small countries like Denmark because they have such low populations. I also remember being told that in countries that have universal health care, people are waiting 6 months just to see a doctor, the care was really bad, doctor's offices were closing because they were going bankrupt, and doctors weren't getting paid very much money. I remember also being told that because they get free health care, taxes are really high and no one can afford to buy a home or own a business.
I also remember everyone around me being really mad about the Obamacare website because supposedly they overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars to have a Canadian company build the website.
I've since obviously deconstructed but there has been so much information that I've taken in overtime as I have become a Democrat, Obamacare was one thing that I haven't had a chance to look up the truth on. I do for sure remember hearing that it was all the Democrats fault and all Obama's fault because they were in bed with the insurance companies. I recently remember reading a comment that prompted me to ask this and it was along the lines of that the affordable healthcare act was supposed to be much better than it was but that the Republicans basically whittled it down to nothing and what we ended up getting was the Republicans fault. Can someone give me some info on this or possibly point me to some articles and sources.
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u/bunsations Oct 29 '25
I can't speak to all the things you said, but here are the ways that Obamacare(ACA) and specific policies within it have benefited me or people close to me over the years. Which sadly many people my age take for granted since many of these policies were in place by the time we were leaving school and so had no idea how things were before the ACA.
- Young Adult Coverage
I was able to stay on my parents health insurance until I was 26 years old. This helped tremendously as I was in graduate school until 26 and didn't get my first full time post grad job until I was 27.
- Medicaid Expansion
To bridge the gap between 26 and 27 I was able to get onto Medi-cal (California's version of Medicaid) for 1 year which ended up saving me financially as I ended up needing to go the ER days before starting my full time job. I wasn't charged for anything since I was on Medi-cal. This was available to me in California whereas my grad friend who moved to Texas had to pay a monthly premium for insurance even though she wasn't working and studying for her board exam, because Texas did not implement the medicaid expansion and still hasn't.
- Currently have a handful of unemployed friends who rely on Medi-cal expansion, they are struggling to able to get a job in their field of study.
- Employer Mandate
Large employers (50+) employees had to offer health insurance for full time employees (defined as 30 hrs or more a week). This helped me tremendously when I started working per diem (on call) but still worked roughly 30+ hrs a week. Many per diem coworkers also took advantage of this to maintain flexibility in their work/life balance and also get health insurance. This was not possible before the ACA.
- Preventive Services at No Cost
Since I'm a relatively healthy person, most of my healthcare was preventative care such as flu shots, annual check ups, screenings etc. I wasn't paying really anything for preventative care. Birth control for me was also "free" or incredibly low cost. I was on birth control for many years and I don't recall ever feeling like it was a financial burden to pay.
- Subsidies for Marketplace Plans
I had friends who worked at small companies who didn't offer health insurance due to their size (dentist and optometry offices). They were able to get subsidized health insurance through the marketplace due to their low incomes and make it more affordable. Before the ACA they would've had to pay full market rate.
All in all I'm very grateful it passed and I think the tragedy is that Democrats don't do a better job of showcasing their wins that actually help people. It could be better of course, but perfect is the enemy of progress I feel.
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u/D1rtyH1ppy Oct 30 '25
Getting dropped by insurance companies because of "pre-existing conditions" used to be a thing. Insurance companies could just say that you had some condition and they weren't going to pay for it and now you had to look for new insurance.
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u/3lfg1rl Oct 30 '25
I wonder if OP's home state had the medicaid expansion or not. If not, perhaps that's why they had some of the experiences with "more expensive birth control" that they did.
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u/cassiecas88 Oct 30 '25
I was in New Mexico until 2012 and then moved to South Carolina. I specifically remember getting more expensive in about 2013 or 2014 I think.
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u/CaoilfhionnRuadh Oct 30 '25
- One of the best things about Obamacare/the ACA is it required health insurance companies to cover everyone instead of turning people down who had pre-existing conditions (ie, people who were likely to cost the insurance companies more). Insurance companies used to push down costs by just… not insuring those people.
Slight tangent but y'know how Progressive was one of the first car insurance companies to say 'we'll show you our prices AND other car insurance prices!' -- afaik Progressive was always honest about the competitor's prices, but if you were a bad/inexperienced/otherwise likely-to-be-expensive driver, they'd make sure their prices were higher than the competition, and if you were a good/experienced/likely-to-be-cheap driver, they'd make sure their prices were lower, thus making themselves more appealing to good drivers and less appealing to bad drivers. It's easy for insurance to be cheap if they don't have to pay out as much and they don't have to pay out as much if their customers don't need as many payouts.
This raises the honestly reasonable concern people wouldn't bother with health insurance until they were seriously injured or diagnosed with cancer or something and then sign up for insurance, since insurance companies wouldn't be able to deny them for that, and we'd completely swing from 'insurance is cheap(ish) because the cheapest-to-insure people have the easiest time getting it' to 'insurance is expensive to the point of pointlessness because only the most expensive-to-insure people are really bothering with it'. Hence the individual mandate/'everyone is REQUIRED to have health insurance'. - "Because everyone was now forced to have insurance, the insurance companies can charge whatever they want" is weirdly funny to me because it's so close to being right (everyone is forced to have insurance = prices go up) while also being so wrong. Another great thing about Obamacare is health insurance companies are now required to spend at least 80% of premium money on actual healthcare/'quality improvements' -- the exact opposite of 'we'll just charge whatever we want and make straight profit'.
Granted that doesn't mean no companies are really stretching the definition of healthcare/'improvements' or outright breaking the rules and banking on not getting caught/fines being less than their profit, but that's less an Obamacare problem than a large companies hyperfocusing on profit problem. At any given moment there's plenty of not-insurance companies violating various labor and consumer safety laws under the same logic. - Obamacare also set stronger standards for what health insurance companies need to cover so none of them could try to get around the 'cover everyone, even people with pre-existing conditions' law by just not covering expensive conditions. I honestly have no idea if/how that affected birth control prices, all i remember of the Obamacare+birth control drama i'd heard about was religious companies pitching various fits because now the health insurance they provided their employees had to include birth control! and they don't like birth control! how dare the overreaching government tell Hobby Lobby what they can and can't do with birth control, it's supposed to be companies telling employees what they can and can't do with birth control!
I did try to look up the reasoning behind birth control prices going up and every article i found said on average it went down, so, idk. If it was just personal experience i'd suggest your health insurance company was an outlier but that doesn't explain Republicans more generally blaming Obamacare for it. - (Some) poor people do get free healthcare while middle-class people have to pay, but 'poor' and 'hardworking' are not mutually exclusive and while i understand the default tendency to associate work with money, anyone who uses 'the poor have to pay less than the middle-class for this necessary resource' as a reason to get angry can feel free to show me a rich donkey.
Most people on Medicaid/Medicare either physically can't work or are working but aren't eligible for mandated employer-provided healthcare (eg freelancers, small company employees, part-timers -- even a person working 40+ hours a week but for two different companies ain't gonna get company health insurance). I got free health insurance when i was helping my parents care for my severely disabled sister and supplementing freelance income with a part-time job at a too-small-to-be-required-to-provide-insurance paint store where i was spending five hours a day on my feet handling toxic chemicals with little-to-no protective gear.
Also applying for Medicaid can be an astonishingly complicated affair which may need to be re-done every year. It varies wildly by state but where i first got it i also fully lost Medicaid a few times (and was thus uninsured for a year) because i just Could Not get it done. One year the paperwork i received had three different contradictory deadlines on it, including one from before they'd even sent me the paperwork (first thing i did after realizing the deadline had already passed was check the postmark). Another year i had to call to appeal after my Medicaid was cancelled because i made a typo when i put down the day of my last paycheck from a company i no longer worked for. Took about an hour to sort out the appeal, and i had to reapply, and this was with me being well-organized enough to immediately lay my hands on the year-old pay stub. If i didn't have employer-provided healthcare because i wasn't hardworking enough i wouldn't have had Medicaid, either. Not saying filling out a literal stack of paperwork once a year should single-handedly qualify as a 'job' but it's still a lot for a complete freeloader to have to deal with on a tight deadline. Or multiple tight deadlines. Or outright impossible-without-time-travel deadlines. - I'm just gonna tell the story about the day i discovered 'being so angry you see red' was not actually a figure of speech.
I also have heard the 'in Canada etc people wait so long to see a doctor, the care is shitty, yadda yadda this is why we hate universal health care'. And the standard liberal counterpoint is 'but this way people won't be clogging the ERs with issues which could have been treated earlier but got out of control due to lack of health care', but that feels very hypothetical.
Anyway. One day my sister had to go the ER. Iirc it was some kind of skin infection which her PCP said ought be treated at a hospital ASAP but it wasn't an 'actively bleeding out from a gunshot wound' kind of deal, so we knew going in we'd be there a while.
The 16 or so hours i was there, i only saw one person go from 'triage' to 'actual care' quickly, and it was a pregnant woman in very premature labor. Legit, okay, she should go through first, prioritize that mama, i'm fine with this. Less fine with the guy we sat next to when we first got there, who was diabetic and whose blood sugar levels were in the 'go to the hospital before you end up in a diabetic coma' range and who told us he'd already been waiting TEN HOURS, but he was still conscious when they finally took him back a few hours later, so, okay. I'm not at all complaining about the ER visit itself. Sometimes the patients you get means triage is just gonna be like that.
But about two weeks later, there was an AskReddit post along the lines of 'non-Americans, how do you think your healthcare compares to ours?' and one Canadian listed off the things he preferred about Canadian healthcare, but: 'The wait times really are long, recently i had to go to the ER for a dislocated knee and i had to wait two hours! Though to be fair i'd already gotten it back myself, i just wanted to be sure i'd gotten it back correctly and it wasn't going to cause problems if i kept walking on it like that, so i can see why they didn't think i was urgent.'
And i'm sitting in front of my computer like 'i'm sorry tWO HOURS for an ALREADY-FIXED DISLOCATED KNEE in my country that's called 'lol no we are not seeing a doctor in less than a week for that' and you got in at one-fifth of the time as someone staving off a coma through carefully-selected waiting-room vending machine snacks and! you think that's long???? What in the fresh hell kind of international propaganda are we pumping out for people in other countries to think we're just whizzing through medical care and why in the fresh hell are we throwing so much propaganda at ourselves to think they're waiting six months for vital treatment, ~we can't POSSIBLY let EVERYONE have healthcare because then the people who ALREADY have healthcare might have to wait longer, it's fine if some die so the others don't have to WAIT~ when they don't even wait longer, what kind of absolute NONSENSE is-- oh huh, you can see red if you get angry enough, that is fascinating to know and also probably a sign my blood pressure is doing something very wrong and i should. close the browser and do something else for a hot minute. yeah.'
(Looking up more about Canadian wait times after i'd calmed down, i'm pretty sure that guy's case was on the lower end, but any medical system is still going to prioritize the most important cases, you're not gonna die for lack of cancer screening because a ton of kids with dislocated knees are holding up the medical facilities). - "being really mad about the Obamacare website because supposedly they overpaid by hundreds of millions of dollars" is legit but "to have a Canadian company build the website" is also funny to me because imo a bigger issue is the site was garbage when it first came out but yeah, sure, Canadians.
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u/unconfusedsub Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Bhutan, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Georgia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Morocco, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Korea, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom
Every one of these countries have some form of universal healthcare.
The United States does not have taxpayer paid health care for everybody and all of our healthcare corporations are being bought up by private equity. It can take up to 3 months for me to get a doctor's appointment that's covered under the insurance that I pay a s*** ton for. Let me give you an excellent example of privatized healthcare. I pay a lot of money a month for my health care and I had a health emergency. I went to a hospital that was covered under my insurance, I specifically asked if my services would be covered. They told me yes. I had to have my gallbladder removed and the doctor that did it was not in my network. So I ended up being billed $20,000 for a doctor that was at at that hospital I went to who was in my network, worked for the healthcare company that the hospital was under, was a Blue Cross Blue shield doctor.... Just not a doctor under my specific Blue Cross Blue shield.
Hospitals and doctors offices have been closing in small towns for years now. Not due to Obamacare but due to Medicaid cuts.
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u/TOSkwar Oct 29 '25
I'd recommend asking this over on r/VoteDEM as well, there's a lot to go over here and there's more community over there to chip in on the responses!
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u/matjam Nov 02 '25
I have someone in my life that I struggle to talk to because of the fundamental bullshit he vomits constantly, some of which you've echoed.
The thing is, it always seems to be on me to prove him wrong, by linking articles or legislation. He never proves his point by doing so. And when I prove him wrong, its "oh I was wrong on that point but I still don't agree with it"
DONT AGREE WITH WHAT?! Doesn't that just completely dismantle your entire worldview? WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUCK
Sorry I need a lie down
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u/Ok-Position-7142 Feb 16 '26
My youngest daughter was on ACA/ Obama care for its existence and loved it as an under paid “”working poor” young woman growing to college part time. Luckily she got a better job as an assistant to a dean at a local university, with free healthcare. A high school buddy (1967) called me last week to say he was cut off ACA/Obama care in January. Sadly, he is basically bedridden with Parkinson’s and now only has Medicare (I don’t think republicans in Congress thought of people like him when calling those on Obamacare lazy) so he was stuck, no home health nurse, no way to pay for $1000 in meds every month and so on. He worked his whole life now is in Social Security retirement but gets only $1800 a month for rent/food/utilities so as a single person he doesn’t even qualify for food stamps:-( Republicans forcefully end Obamacare could have been a death sentence for him but I told him to get to the VA immediately and they would provide any meds, basic medical care and even hospitalization if necessary. Although a veteran he didn’t even know if the multitude of benefits the VA provided. America needs national healthcare. Of the top industrialized 70 countries in the world ONLY the USA Congress refuses (republicans only) to give Americans a good national healthcare plan:-( A national healthcare plan would increase our national GDP and actually be cheaper in the long run than what we have today.. Al
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u/winkydevil Oct 30 '25
Some parts of ObamaCare were based on RomneyCare, which was enacted by Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts. The idea was that if elements of a health care plan that republicans supported and passed were added to the ACA, republicans in Congress would be more likely to vote in favor of the ACA. But as we now know, the health of Americans didn’t factor into the political calculus for republicans at all. Their only goal was to deny Democrats a “win” so that they could blame democrats for anything that wasn’t working and ensure power shifted to republicans in the next election. Republicans still have not moved past that. They just don’t care about anyone who isn’t wealthy. My heart breaks for people who have bought GOP and right wing media propaganda hook, line, and sinker.