tl;dr: republicans have pushed the CHOICE arrangement act through the house. this act which will push back regulations on "short-term" plans (which biden calls "junk insurance" because of how little they're required to cover compared to normal healthcare plans) & make them much more widespread. these plans, while cheaper, can often miss very important requirements such as prescription drugs, hospitalization, & mental health care
I have to jump thru hoops, wait, and pay a significantly higher out of pocket for any imaging outside of X-rays. Due to my employer, I am locked into a single provider. Sure, I can (and do) have supplementary insurance, but FFS why is that even necessary?
The answer to all of the above, IMO?
Corporate greed, enabled by government intervention.
The Affordable Care Act isn’t our real problem, we can lay that at the feet of Richard Nixon .
i mean, i agree that we should do something about healthcare prices & that obamacare is not faring so well right now. but trying to make it easier to get junk healthcare plans without doing anything about decreasing the price of full-fledged healthcare plans will just make things worse, & lead to a situation where low-income people are priced out of even being able to afford a full healthcare plan & forced to either default to these "short-term"/association plans or not have any at all
Don't get me wrong, this proposal is by no means perfect or even the thing I would ideally address first.
But making more options for small companies and loosening the restrictions on what qualifies for health insurance will help curb the cost of medical care overall.
What is the point of having cheap insurance options if said insurance does not cover or actually do anything? It's worthless junk literally! Instead of taking the insurance you'd be better off pocketing the money and forgoing it all together.
I don't know how you can blame "Obamacare" for medical prices increasing when it is clear that they would have and will continue to rise no matter if "Obamacare" still exists or not. When healthcare is about profits and is a business, whether any of us live or die does not matter to these companies.