At those low wage levels you’d either get free Medicaid (up to 4x poverty line depending on your State) or heavily subsidized marketplace plan.

These plans are crap, you pay hundreds of dollars that you don't really have to get stuck with a deductible of thousands. Obamacare needs to die, maybe it does with the pandemic.

I hate to break it to you, but most employer plans, even in tech, will have someone paying hundreds of dollars and still have a deductible of thousands. Only a few companies pay all of it (and, because we're talking tech, it's not that big a deal anyway since cost of plan + max out of pocket is < $15k).

The fact it's easier to afford if you make more money is...well, sort of the reason why people want it to be universal, and covered by taxes, so the rich can offset it for the poor.

What I'm saying is that at the low end of the wage scale Obamacare is a public health hazard. You have people avoiding necessary healthcare because the money for deductible or medication isn't there.

It was even worse before the ACA.

At least with Obamacare, you (likely) won’t go bankrupt if you break a leg.

You also get preventative care fully covered (or ~$30 copay) even with plans that have $6,000 deductibles.

That includes both low & high cost items, like annual physicals and colonoscopies.

No, Obamacare shouldn’t die (as you said in an earlier comment) but it should be replaced with something that improves on what it’s already done.

Personally, I favor Medicare for all.

I believe what you are saying is true in some instances at some scale, but I wonder if what you say is the median case or a sample case that you’ve been fed by an anti-ACA source.

My anecdata for people on ACA is that it works pretty well, with a caveat that premiums are high due to various misaligned incentives in the US health care system.

I’m not sure what your experience with it was, but in California it can be fairly cheap. Some anecdata:

- bartender friend of mine got laid off due to covid. With unemployment at ~$3k a month, he paid about $200 a month for insurance that had very low deductibles and overall seemed to be a good plan (silver). It was better than the plan I had as a university professor at a “good” university.

- another friend of mine started her own business. Very low income the first year (maybe $20k?) and was living on savings. She ended up paying about $100 a month for similar insurance to the bartender friend above.

The “downside” of these plans is that they scale aggressively with income. For reference, the entrepreneur friend’s business took off in year two, and now she’s paying about $1100 a month. This sounds high, but that’s what her group plan cost at her previous employer when you factored in the company contributions.

What? I’m on one of those plans and frankly it’s pretty darn great. The premiums are cheap because they are heavily subsidized. The subsidy goes up the less you earn. My generic prescriptions are cheap. The co-pay is $45 for most Dr. visits. I think the Emergency copay is $150.