Linked elsewhere: https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Figure-1-12.p...
That's a pretty straight line, with no noticeable change because of ACA.
> But it’s purely at the expense of the healthy subsidizing them with overly expensive policies.
This is how insurance works.
The US needs a proper public healthcare system. Good luck finding a way to make that happen though.
The point is not about insurance in general, it’s the isolation of the individual market from the pools of large employers.
Yes the healthy will always be subsidizing the rest, but it’s a specific subset of healthy bearing that burden. It’s not the system as a whole.
> The US needs a proper public healthcare system. Good luck finding a way to make that happen though.
Ban corporate self insured policies so that the risk pools are unified to contain everyone.
Eliminate the deduction for offering insurance. Right now the same policy is cheaper if paid by the company as its pretax dollars (vs after tax dollars for an individual policy).
There should be only state or nation wide risk pools.
The individual mandate has been gone since 2019.
They were going up before, during, and post ACA mandate, though. They've been on an upwards march alongside the underlying per-capita healthcare costs for decades. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe... ("Total national health expenditures, US $ per capita, 1970-2022" - $2k/year --> $13k/year per person)
There were some pandemic era programs that increased the number of insured people, so it is possible things have changed since 2022. Either way, there is no evidence that the repeal of the individual mandate actually resulted in less people with health insurance.
In contrast, people with corporate policies are generally self insured so the per capital costs are lower. Really any company with more than a few hundred people is better off being self insured.
So yes it’s great for the minority that could not get insurance (outside of high risk pools) previously. But it’s purely at the expense of the healthy subsidizing them with overly expensive policies.
Its a really stupid system and of all the possible solutions they (the Democrats when they rammed it through Congress at the 11th hour) picked the one that provides the least actual healthcare and funnels the most money to insurance companies.