Oh, I can totally believe that she thinks these things. Hell, she could totally be paying that much.
But I’m 99% certain that she doesn’t NEED to be paying that much.
Here’s a recent experience I had this past year. Interestingly enough, it involved my sister who also has Fibromyalgia.
She was recently laid off, and has since started her own job as a freelance designer. And she’s quite successful, and making good money. But she had no health insurance. Since she has a pre-existing condition, I told her, "Hey, you need to get insurance NOW, because once the ACA is repealed, you are gonna have a really hard time getting insurance. You may have a hard time anyway, but it’ll be BETTER if you are at least able to already have insurance.
So she went onto the NY Exchange… and had a nightmare of a time. Basically, here’s why: instead of doing what I would have done, which is just use the website directly and pick a plan, she did what I suspect lots of folks do, and used the help of the “navigators”. Navigators are basically unpaid volunteers who help you pick a plan. Also… they don’t really have any clue.
She worked with these folks for literally weeks to try and get signed up. They kept asking her for financial info and crap about earnings. Now, this is understandable. You need that to know if you qualify for subsidies and crap. But I know that my sister doesn’t, because she makes a damn good chunk of change. But it’s extra complex, since she no longer has a constant employment salary, and it’s definitely different from last year’s earnings… but whatever. It’s really not fair for me to lay the blame on the navigators, because a big part of the issue I’m sure came from my sister not really knowing what the hell was going on.
Anyway, they fucked it up, and almost signed her up for a terrible plan (first one which was crazy expensive and offered no benefits, and then another one which was good, but was a medicaid plan, because they incorrectly listed her annual income as negative $4k a year), but then I just took over and fixed it in a few minutes.
But she easily could have had a bad experience, and gotten a crappy plan… but this isn’t the same thing as the ACA being flawed. There were better options to be had.
You’re right that we need to not ostracize them forever. But at the same time, I think that it’s still important that they were willing to accept what were promises to oppress various minority groups, in order to improve some aspect of their own lives.
To me, things like having a police state that rounds up millions of people, or banning people for their religion, is so abhorrent that I couldn’t vote for someone who suggested those things, even if they offered me some really nice incentives. Like, if they said, “I’m gonna cut YOUR taxes, while doing these other things!” I’d still say no, because even if I wanted those nice things, the evil shit is still fucking evil, and voting for it makes ME evil.
