How The Progressive Takeover Could Happen

[Celerity]

10. The ACA never came close to covering 'everybody else'. The alltime low unisured # still left nearly 26 million uncovered

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/health-policy-101-the-uninsured-population-and-health-coverage/?entry=table-of-contents-trends-in-the-uninsured-rate

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Trends in the Uninsured Rate

In 2023, there were 25.3 million uninsured residents ages 0-64, and the uninsured rate among the population ages 0-64 was 9.5%, the lowest rate in U.S. history (Figure 2). The analysis of the uninsured population focuses on coverage among people ages 0-64 since Medicare offers near-universal coverage for seniors—just 457,000, or less than 1%, of people over age 65 were uninsured.

Prior to the implementation of the ACA, gaps in the public insurance system and lack of access to affordable private coverage left over 40 million people without health insurance......

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my thoughts:

The ACA is far better than that what was before it, especially the prohibition on blocking people with pre-existing conditions, but it is far far from an overall satisfactory system, both in terms of the number of uninsured and also the wealth extraction due to the still extremely high healthcare costs compared to the rest of the advanced world. It leaves intact the rapacious profit motive at the centre of the US healthcare system.

Healthcare is a basic human right, but a massive part of the American system (whether private firms, political actors, or simply US citizens, etc) fails to believe that. The results of that denial and the failure to address it adequately are catastrophic.