Under Obamacare, premiums and deductibles are skyrocketing. Obamacare's premiums were supposed to increase annually by an average of "only" 25 percent, but the architects attempted to spin it by suggesting that most people wouldn't feel the increase because of higher subsidies to help offset the costs. However, former Treasury Department and Office of Management and Budget staffer J.T. Young noted in RealClearMarkets that this defense ignores the cost to the taxpayer as well as the fact that subsidies are indicative of a bad economic model.

Successful economic endeavors do not need subsidies. Producers create a product consumers want to buy and realize a competitive rate of profit. Both sides gain and willingly enter into a transaction. Absent that mutually beneficial relationship, there is no market.

ObamaCare shows what occurs when government tries to enforce a market. By applying subsidies to one or both sides of the economic equation, its enforced market cannot exist without continued government subsidies in the short-term, and becomes unsustainable in the long-term as politics compounds subsidies' distortion.

Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. There is no incentive for providers to offer competitively priced services when their customers are forced to buy them! True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Portability and competition is the key to reducing costs.

@firstbase

Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs.

Looking at any chart even on PV you can see US healthcare cost rising fast long before any Obama.

But most fun is that horrible situation becomes even worst is due to big opposition of exactly free market guys. Progressive way is monopolization and forming of one monopoly in this sector. Same that happening across all capitalism. If you want to apply reaction principles and try to hold into large diversity, you, inevitably end up with... subsidies.. ta dam.

Worst even is that never in history existed effective and working market for "healthcare services". Each time such market wanted to form humanity drove away looking even at early horrors.

@eatstoomuchjam

It is not due to governments, but due to much better socialization of it all and much less parasites on it.

Ideally healthcare can be only free.

I have experienced both US (corporate, pre-Obamacare and post Obamacare) as well as the French government run healthcare system. Let me just say that next to French healthcare, US looks like, feels like living in the dark age of healthcare. Prescription drugs are 3-4x cheaper than US, and very expensive drugs that are needed for critical care are covered at 100% (in the US that will be wishful thinking). Can I get a physician to do a house call in the US? no, but I can do in France. Can I choose to go to my preferred physician in France, yes I do. Hospital stays, surgeries are substantially cheaper and you can just go on and on. And you can se French are living substantially longer than Americans even though they have cream and butter in their cuisine. There is no perfect healthcare system but Americans need to wake up: they get a very lousy deal.

@firstbase

Given that rationale, everything should be free including TVs, cars, food, housing, etc...

Exactly. :-)

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

It is also interesting to start understand how huge is amount of people who waste their life on shit as you make things accessible without money.

@eatstoomuchjam

Your opinions aren't falling on deaf ears - they're just incorrect when it comes to health care

Problem here is also it can bee too late as personal experience will force to change them.

@Ewstrobel yeah - they give free healthcare to criminals, criminals then assault some unlucky person who has poor health insurance, and that person now has 10s of thousands in bills to pay. It's absolutely nuts

What amazes me still is how doggedly people hold on to their pet theories, even as evidence to the contrary mounts. I'm born and raised in the U.S., so maybe this is a bit presumptuous, but it seems the U.S.A. also leads the world in people who just refuse to be wrong.

And I just don't get this. When did it become so bad to be wrong? At what age and sheer volume of pampering and encouragement does one finally dig in their heels and shout to the universe, "I WILL LEARN NO MORE!"?

Every scientific breakthrough, social movement, moment of progress in history climbed to existence on the backs of people who were previously wrong. But no more, it seems.

"If I want to believe that God made the earth 6000 years ago, all evidence to the contrary are just lies and conspiracies."

"If my short term self interest requires that mankind has had no effect on the earth's climate, then the overwhelming tidal wave of evidence to the contrary is just some clean energy conspiracy."

And, of course, "My personal politics and 'team' I follow suggest that free markets are the best solution to everything. The solution to the ridiculous cost and marginal efficacy of health care in the United States is less regulation, more choice, and more trickle-down. So no list of countries with single payer systems that do it better for less is going to convince me otherwise."

My health insurance is provided by my employer. When I hired on, in 2003, it was an amazing plan. The company covered 100%, and I had no deductibles, prescriptions paid, and even a generous amount of massage and/or counseling included. The first thing to go was the 100% coverage, with the company dropping to 80%. Then there were deductibles. Then increasingly low levels of coverage for prescription drugs. Massage therapy became almost impossible to use. Now there's a large minimum annual deductible, increased deductibles for individual services, very high deductible for emergency care, and increasingly high prescription drug deductibles. And every year the cost of the plan has increased, and therefore so has the 20% that comes out of my paycheck. And almost all of this damage was done before the ACA even existed.

In spite of all of this, nobody I work with will even entertain the idea of single payer healthcare. "Uncle Sam already takes enough of my paycheck! Are you crazy!?" I can then ask them how much they're spending on healthcare now annually versus what they were spending a decade ago, point out that, using pretty much every other industrialized nation as a reference, Uncle Sam would be taking less from their pay check than the insurance companies, and they still balk and refuse to even consider it as an option. What I've found is that, to an extremely large swath of Americans, a.) paying taxes is for some reason a hundred times worse than paying even more to private companies, and b.) what works in other countries has no chance of working here, because the United States is--very vaguely--"different."