Landlord, your's is a perfect illustration of the fundamental problem with Obamacare and demonstrates it well. Actually, the only people who benefitted from Obamacare (it applies to each and every person in the country so don't get confused if you think you have some other policy, program or option - they are all regulated, constructed, priced and dictated by the Affordable Care Act (Obama/Pelosi, etall Care).
The prices (premiums and copays and deductibles) for virtually all policies and coverages have doubled in just eight years since Obamacare was passed (quite literally voted on by every Democrat without being able to read it or know what was in it).
Most of the 'uninsured' in this country are not covered by health insurance because they choose not to be - principally because the can't afford it and even if they could manage to pay the premiums, the out of pocket costs of the so called copays and deductibles are cost prohibitive. If you don't buy the insurance, you can atleast afford to go to the doctor for a check up and basic care if you find yourself battling a cold or flu or some little bump or bruise or sprain or whatever. You will find that those treatments are actually less expensive if you DON"T have insurance that if you do.
There are the 'pre-existing conditions' cases which are not insignifcant but the country could have created a simple health care coverage program for those with the pre-existing conditions so the insurance companies could be reimbursed for accepting the chronically ill or sick patients without sinking the entire ship that is actuarily sound health insurance.
But the biggest problem with 'health insurance' is that the entire notion of 'insurance' and getting health care are just not well suited for each other. Insurance is a concept or idea intended and really only fairly suited to spreading the risk of the rare but predictable occurrences across a large number of insureds. Like house insurance, the risk of loss if a fire burns down your house is low but the cost if such a rare thing happens is very high. Thus, if a large number of homeowners pay a small sum in to a pot (the insurance risk pool of policyholders), then the few unfortunate ones who have fires can be reimbursed for their loss less a small fraction of a deductible to eliminate the costs of handling 'penny ante' claims for the damage as a result of candle smoke fumes or some insigificant.
Healthcare and insurance don't fit and become unreasonably bureaucratic and therefore excessively costs to administrate and manage when you take away the similarities of the two examples. Health insurance at its best is only reasonably workable as for example a 'cancer' plan or a 'major medical' or such plan. Having a plan that pays for the first visits and the prescriptions and so on (a pay for everything and you just pay premiums monthly) is the very fundamental root cause of the massive and out of control inflationary spiral of healthcare and health insurance costs. There really is not an 'insurance' aspect to the idea as it becomes 'prepaid healthcare' administrative aid. The insurance company is nothing but a bill receiver/payer service provider. They tend to pay their employees well and as a result their services are not cheap.
Economically, Obamacare simply attempted by force of law to mandate that all people must purchase 'health insurance' on the terms and conditions that Obamacare mandated. It did not in any way mandate that all people have full access to healthcare. So, Landlord, you and millions and millions more Americans were being told you must buy an Obamacare health insurance policy (want it, need it, like it, afford it or NOT), so that you can pay tax (we'll call them premiums) so that the uninsured are somehow now insured. As you point out, what good is this kind of insurance which won't pay anything to help you because the deductibles are astronomically high and the premium is beyond your reach fiscally anyway. Like many, you don't make enough money to live (economically speaking - over the past decade we've seen nearly half the country find themselves in this very predicament).
There are plenty of available health care services in America to take care of everyone but for a bunch of folks, the prevailing costs of those services is beyond their immediate capacity. Often the bill for the first visit is more than the total available money of the patient at the time. Not so much because the services are grossly overpriced, although hospital charges are outrageous (driven up by a race to be the best, most modern, fancy facilities on the planet). All the government money being poured into healthcare has fueled the inflationary fires and spawned a facilities 'arms race' of sorts. Fancy buildings cost big money and those costs are added intio all those bills the providers send to the government and insurers (administrators). There are many more aspects but this is the short version of the fundamentals of Obamacare.
Any solution must involve a dramtic reduction in the availability of healthcare 'insurance' - quite the opposite of Obamacare in fact - along with any other non- patient controlled funding sources so that the consumer and the providers are restored to their more typical positions in the economic marketplace of product/service and purchaser/seller. Competition for patients between providers and public disclosure of prices for services are critical. At this point, it is almost impossible for you to go into the doctor or have some lab work done and find out how much the cost will be BEFORE the work is done. There is no free exchance of price and quality and service terms in the market so consumers are shopping blindly with someone else's money. It is to be expected that prices will soar out of control as they have. It is not rocket science - just basic economics - but the funamental laws of economics apply just as the laws of physics apply to rocket.
We need consumers incomes to rise and the costs of healthcare to fall. That requires better wages for workers (you get higher wages when the demand for labor exceeds the available supply so 'build that wall' for starters) and empower patients with pricing and other negotiating information on costs and services and stop the blank check and ex post facto billing process that makes services so costly and let the patient do more of the paying themselves.
