U.S. Voters Back Medicare Expansion but Not Eliminating Private Insurance

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82. The ACA has specific eligibility guidelines for employers to send their employees to the exchanges

The number of employees, the average salary that employees get, etc.

My brother in law works for a small company of 15, but they are all paid extremely well - six figures. Because of their salary, the employees were not eligible for any subsidies on the exchange, and because the company was so small, they were exempt from providing health care coverage, or having to seek a group rate for their employees.

Because they were ex-pats in other countries for years, my sister could not really get a job, or start a career, so there was no way to get health care via that route.

So now they are permanently in the US, and they have to purchase health care coverage for a family of four at $4,000 a month.

If that company was a housekeeping company with minimum wage workers, those workers would be eligible for subsidies on the exchanges.

There had to be tradeoffs in order to fund the ACA, and while they complain about the price, they know that it made things better for many people who didn't make six figures.

My father's business employs 5 people, including himself, and he went ahead and made health insurance part of the employee benefits, partly because it would allow him to get insurance at a reduced rate, because his income went into that higher level, and partly because the ACA gave incentives to small businesses with median/low income employees to do this.

Unfortunately, there are people who are self-employed who make too much to be eligible for subsidies, and don't qualify for the small business incentives to provide health insurance. Many of those people simply pay the $600 fee in their taxes and hope for the best. There are a lot of self employed people who are angry about the ACA, because the ACA got rid of the low premium/high deductible catastrophic insurance policies that they had before.

It's complicated. Anyone who tells you that there is a simple solution to this very complicated part of our economy is running for office, or selling something.