So what's going to happen to health care now?

Nurses General Nursing

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So, for better or worse, we have a new President. What do you think will be the future of health care and the future of nursing as a profession? Will we be better off as nurses or worse? Will we be better off as patients or worse?

Not looking for a political argument....god knows we've had enough of those in the past few days. Emotions are running high and we all have opinions. I'm just curious as to what we can expect.

I'm hoping something good comes of it. As it stands, the ACA hasn't made healthcare affordable. Premiums just increased dramatically in my state, making it absolutely unaffordable for my husband and I to both be covered. We don't qualify for subsidies, he doesn't have insurance through work and for us both to be covered under my plan from work would be $850 a month which is pretty much most of my paycheck. And that would be just for medical. It doesn't include vision and dental. So at the moment, I'm insured, he isn't. And we're just hoping we won't be in a situation where he needs something until we can get it figured out. Oh, and we're newly married so things are tight money-wise. But right now, we definitely don't have the money for insurance because premiums are ridiculous. Hopefully something can be done about those stupid-high premiums.

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Specializes in Critical Care.
I would like to see private, person owned health care plan

I'm curious what that means.

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Specializes in Critical Care.
I'm hoping something good comes of it. As it stands, the ACA hasn't made healthcare affordable. Premiums just increased dramatically in my state, making it absolutely unaffordable for my husband and I to both be covered. We don't qualify for subsidies, he doesn't have insurance through work and for us both to be covered under my plan from work would be $850 a month which is pretty much most of my paycheck. And that would be just for medical. It doesn't include vision and dental. So at the moment, I'm insured, he isn't. And we're just hoping we won't be in a situation where he needs something until we can get it figured out. Oh, and we're newly married so things are tight money-wise. But right now, we definitely don't have the money for insurance because premiums are ridiculous. Hopefully something can be done about those stupid-high premiums.

True insurance wasn't really available in the individual market prior to the ACA, the majority of people who declared bankruptcy due to medical bills prior to the ACA had insurance, so it wasn't doing much to keep healthcare sustainably funded.

Health insurance is now required to actually do what's supposed to and reflect a person's share of healthcare costs, which isn't a bad thing but also isn't cheap.

For each person that pays less than their share, someone else has to pay more, so we can't just say everyone can pay less, instead there's a necessary cutoff for subsidies. If you and your spouse don't qualify for a subsidy then that means you make more than $64k a year, well above the US average for an entire household. What do you think the cutoff should be?

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People can also not make enough money to qualify for a health insurance subsidy, yet not qualify for Medicaid. This situation is known as the "Coverage Gap", and a number of people fall into it.

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Not sure, but trying to be positive (at least here on AN) regarding Trump and his advisors. I have little hope, but his politics will affect Canada as well. Maybe Trump will react in haste and find himself impeached.

For now, we can only speculate on health care reform.

The professor that predicted trump's win, is predicting that his own party will impeach him within the year. So that they can put pence in the white house because he is more easily controlled. Remember, the dems can't do it, they don't have the numbers. pence is worse in many ways: voting rights and choice, the leading two.

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Which ones? He says something different every time he opens his mouth.

agree, but i would have put colorful adjective before mouth....

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Things are done very differently in the countries you mentioned, and those things drive the cost of healthcare. I've sat in many waiting rooms in the US while my partner has had surgeries. The waiting rooms were all new, with nice furniture, fresh paint and carpets, televisions. Who do you think pays for all that?

When I sat with my dad in an ICU in Canada, the waiting room was a dismal, depressing experience. No windows, crap furniture; very uncomfortable. That's because the health care dollars only fund health care, not all the other niceness that Americans take for granted and don't realize they are paying for.

That's only one small example of why health care costs are different in different places. It's really hard to take in the WHOLE PICTURE of why something can happen in one place and not the other.

There are many of us here in the USA that understand perfectly well who pays for that stuff, and would be happier not to see it

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I think those slob politicians should have to be on the garbage they forced upon the citizens. The only good is those with no insurance have it...but it created others that don't have it and is breaking the bank creating horrible financial issues but then again that was the plan wasn't it ? To make all the citizens live in poverty while the politicians live high on the hot!

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Specializes in Critical Care and ED.

Seeing as he just hired a white supremacist and a radical homophone to his team, you have every right to be. I am also extremely concerned. I fear my marriage rights being taken away.

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The professor that predicted trump's win, is predicting that his own party will impeach him within the year. So that they can put pence in the white house because he is more easily controlled. Remember, the dems can't do it, they don't have the numbers. pence is worse in many ways: voting rights and choice, the leading two.

A president can only be impeached for what is deemed High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Being a lousy president doesn't qualify lol. and no president who was ever impeached, there were three, have ever been removed from office because of it. one resigned, Nixon, two stayed in office, Johnson and Clinton. Never enough to convict any president, so an impeachment was just a paper project.

trump would never give up the presidency willingly he'd have to die in office and then we can get pence lol.

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I read somewhere that Ryan wanted to cut medicare and make it private. That would have a huge effect on this industry.

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I have always had insurance through my employer at a fairly reasonable rate, I hope that continues. But the ACA has been anything but affordable in my state. I was truly shocked at the insurance quotes with the sky high premiums and ridiculously high deductibles my daughter was getting. I actually advised her to just take the tax penalty that first year because it was much less than the insurance would have cost her. Not to mention unless something truly catastrophic happened there is no way a reasonably healthy individual would ever see a penny from the policy as the deductibles are impossible to meet.

I am not at all certain what changes will eventually be made with a republican majority congress and a republican president but I do hope that somehow, some way the affordable part actually happens. But I fear that is an empty hope as the states with the highest premiums and deductibles on the open market have been the states that so wholly disagreed with the ACA that they refused any federal government funds in the first place. It probably won't be long before those federal funds go away for every state.

The ACA was a nightmare for me due to pre existing health issues so I paid the tax penalties for the first two years. Having insurance through my job with the outrageous deductions made it practically impossible to see a doctor and now 7 yrs later my condition got worse.

A nurse told me her brother died because he couldn't afford the outrageous medical cost. Unless you have good healthcare insurance through your job you were one of the ones paying high amounts of money each month to pay for thisetwho weren't working and due to my pre existing condition it was too expensive so I was like it's not fair if someone doesn't work, they get section 8 rent,food ebt and welfare, health care handed to them.

Even people who weren't born and are not green card holders get to have free healthcare if they visit an emergency room and I don't need to explain the free millions of dollars many undocumented people get through home health due to their special need children formula, diapers,chucks, DME, wheelchairs, supplies, trach gtube vent machines, millions of dollars a year but here I am an American citizen, an LVN is being charged hundreds of dollars a month for my healthcare and the deductions our outrageous.

Mind you prior to the ACA I never had insurance issues with any of my jobs prior to nursing and can't comment on what home health and other non hospital jobs insurance were like prior to the ACA.

ACA helped some people but it was a disaster to many hard working people.

I pay my own rent, food etc and as a new nurse although I can easily get home health jobs most don't offer good health care benefits so it was better to not work and get my serious medical condition fixed first sadly.

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