On October 1, 2013, Americans are supposed to start shopping for insurance under new Healthcare Insurance Marketplaces established under the Affordable Care Act. But there has been no attempt by the government to explain what people should do. And the system is buggy and complicated. Here’s an “easy” guide to make it simple for you.
Of course, in case it isn’t obvious, the crappy graphics and excessive gradients and tiny fonts are intentional and an attempt to satirize the complexity and the inability of the government to make things simple and understandable.
Believe it or not, one entire paragraph is word for word taken from an official government press release about this. See if you can guess which one it is.
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Either way I still can’t afford it.
I’m guessing it’s the middle paragraph in the last panel. 🙂
Yep.
Having worked for the government, I found it easy to recognize the “jargon”! 🙂
The part about “Cost Sharing Reduction Subsidy”. What a joke.
Clueless children fighting over some spare change tossed on the floor – The real question is why does healthcare cost so frigg’in much in the USA, and why isn’t everyone covered like in a lot of the other “developed” countries? The short answer is that healthcare in the USA is one of the biggest scams ever.
Keep putting up with it – it’s only your health anyway, huh?
And hunger has become “food insecurity”? We need more bats in boardrooms – yeah, that’s baseball bats.
The essential, core problem with “ObamaCare” is the two assumptions behind it:
1) Those without health insurance have the money to purchase it it, but simply refuse to do so.
2) Those without health insurance have a societal duty to purchase it.
Neither one of these assumptions is true. Not everyone can afford it, and no has the “duty” to purchase anything from anyone.
For every young yuppie who can get health insurance but doesn’t think about it because they’re healthy, there are many more who truly can’t afford it, but at the same time are not poor enough for Medicaid. And since when is it okay to make the young yuppie purchase a product he or she doesn’t want?
I went to the ACA website, and it’s riddled with Orwellian bullshit like “individual shared responsibility payment”, which is the fee they tell you you “must pay” if you don’t get health insurance. I felt like I was reading something from The Onion.
Frankly, something this divorced from reality is probably doomed from the start, regardless if Republicans “defund” it or not.
We may be a US vassal state, but here in Sweden we still have fairly adequate public health care, paid mainly via provincial taxes, despite the best efforts of the right-wing four-party government since 2006 to stealthily dismantle it and «privatise» everything that moves. Hopefully we’ll be able to get rid of this collection of misfits in the general elections of 2015 and secure public health care for at least another decade or so, According to World Bank statistics (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS), in 2011 we devoted about 9.4 % of our GDP to health care, about half of the corresponding US figure (17.9 %). We enjoy lower infant mortality and a longer life expectancy than do residents of the United States….
Henri
Okay. Here’s a question asked in all seriousness.
Where’s the iPhone approach to hospital costs? Every time the iPhone comes out, the tech boys come up with the list of what each part costs to make, ship to factories, the labor costs, etc., and then deduce what Apple’s per-unit profit margin is.
Where’s the same premise applied to hospitals? I would love to see exactly how much a kidney stone extraction costs, compared to what the hospital charges.