...that the ACA is failed legislation, although I suppose that depends upon what we thought it's intended purpose was. If it was meant to enhance fair, affordable access to healthcare for all Americans, it failed from day one, IMO. It embraces wealth care modeled on the rapacious mercies of insurance industry parasites and explicitly rejects publicly funded healthcare as provided by government in much of the rest of the developed world. The simple circumstances that healthcare is not available under the ACA unless you (or someone else) buys it from insurance companies, and we find ourselves needing to subsidize even that to satisfy the for-profit healthcare gatekeepers demonstrate the ACA's failure. The ACA is just lipstick on a pig, and we're all falling for the scam.
On the other hand, if the ACA was meant to codify our national insistence that Americans don't deserve unimpeded health care, but everyone must nonetheless tithe for insurance executives, well then, in that case it's a resounding success. Health insurance profits are fantastic!
My wife and I receive free-to-us health care, the end case for Medicare-for-all. We have a union pension that pays our medicare premiums (parts A and B) and also provides commercial supplemental insurance, vision, dental, Part D, etc. If CALPERS can do it, the U.S. Treasury certainly can too, for substantially less money than Americans are already paying for healthcare. That last, supplemental link in the chain could easily be completed by American government, either by *very* closely regulating the behavior of health insurers or simply by providing services as a non-profit function of government on an NHS sort of model, and let the capitalist market drive the for-profit healthcare industry into history. The current ACA primarily protects the industry's for-profit stranglehold on health care.
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