She is outside of subsidy-ville.  According to Kaiser, the estimated cost to insure her is over $8000.  She will lose her house if she has to put that money each year toward medical insurance rather than house payments...that money wouldn't go toward health care, it would go toward medical insurance.  After that, she would have to pay a $1700-3000 deductible (again according to Kaiser) before she gets a dime of care paid for.

She is going to try and get the mandate waived. If she can't, she's going to put herself out there as one of the first to test whether the govt can throw you in jail or otherwise peanlize you for not paying it.

Free riders/welfare queens or whatever you call them, this is the reality that YOUR government has created for a host of people.  Your government did this insanely evil thing.

And BTW, she pays for her own health care.  She is not a welfare queen, free rider in your words.

I hope you fecking can sleep at night. Because I can't.

I'm not saying "free riders" don't exist, but that's not what this bill was aimed at (at least, that's what we were told).  And to make it sound like the majority of "free riders" are "free riders" because they choose not to buy insurance until they need it is simply ludicrous.

If anything, people who have no insurance who do need care end up paying more - a lot more - than those with plans, because no one negotiates the cost of services for those without insurance.

The real problem we have with this and every other private insurance-based model is that a lot of people are still faced with choices like, "what should I pay first - the rent or the health insurance, the mortgage or the health insurance?"  They are skimping on the food budget - and I don't mean giving up tenderloin for tuna, I mean giving up meat for macaroni - in order to pay for shelter.  And now, for a lot of them, they will have to add health insurance into the mix.

And worse, we've done nothing to solve the real problem that where you live will continue to have a lot to do with the level of access and affordability you have.  That's just wrong.

This is kind of eye-opening:

Even if the law goes into effect as scheduled in 2014, red state governors can vow not to implement its component parts. This covers not only the Medicaid expansion, but the insurance exchanges, the marketplaces where customers can shop on the individual market and compare policies, and reap subsidies for the purchase of coverage at the low end. There was supposed to be a fail-safe in the law; if governors rejected setting up the exchanges, they revert to the federal government, which would set them up for the states. However, there's one key detail that was left out of that equation. There's no money to pay for that.

So why isn't Jindal reluctantly complying rather than hand a small measure of sovereignty over to the federal government? Because as the result of a drafting oversight, Congress neglected to include automatic appropriations for federally facilitated exchanges (FFEs). That means there's money on hand to help states that want to set up the exchanges themselves, but the government's options vis-a-vis states that can't or won't act on their own are more limited [...]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) can reallocate money appropriated to HHS' generic operations account internally, to put more toward establishing FFEs. But in anticipation of the need for greater funding, HHS included a request for $1 billion for program operations in its fiscal year 2013 budget, according to administration and Senate officials. The Senate Appropriations Committee, controlled by Democrats, has recommended just over half a billion for this account. But House Republicans could use their leverage to block providing HHS with any funds they think the administration might need to implement the ACA.

Republicans have engaged in the defunding wars over Obamacare on other fronts. But similar to the Medicaid expansion, funding for the federally facilitated exchanges would represent a new appropriation, not just filling the old buckets. That makes it infinitely more difficult to succeed, as does the fact that not implementing makes the bill cheaper, which will be attractive to budget-conscious appropriators.

So, what then?  What if you are someone whose state will not only not expand Medicaid to cover you, but will also not establish the exchanges from which you might be able to get some kind of minimum insurance?

There's no question that there are components to the Act that will help people, but you simply cannot ignore the flaws, nor can you ignore the consequences of the SC decision or the intransigence of Republican-led states that are going to deny a lot of people access to care they can afford.

Enough already with the sparkle dust; it's no consolation to those living in red states that their brethren in the blue states are going to fare better under this law than they are.  And it's doing nothing to beat Republicans at their own petty game.