More trouble for Obamacare.

Is the chicken required by law to carry health insurance, because we sure are. Like the chicken, people who don't need health insurance are still required to buy it or pay a fine. Do you really think Donald Trump needs health insurance? If he gets sick he can just buy a hospital. And you're not allowed to buy the insurance you need. You're required to buy the expensive insurance they want you to have. Plans that cover male pregnancy. How often is anyone going to use that? And of course premiums have been going up and up, and universities are have to hike their prices by huge amounts because, prior to Obamacare, they had the cheapest risk pool there was. But now all the students have to pony up to pay for the costs of old rich people like Donald Trump, because insurers knew they could make a lot more money if they could just force people to buy their crappy, overpriced products.

Clearly, we need an exemption for Kryptonians.

Or we could ask health providers not to store doctors in warehouses. For some reason, @gturner seems mostly opposed to government warehouses; as long as we get rid of them, food stamps apparently aren't a problem.

If you use the analogy of food stamps, you get Medicaid, not Obamacare. Obamacare is where Bill Gates or Ben Carson have to prove they have health insurance or they get fined. Couldn't the government just as easily say that you have to insure anything that is insurable, like your body if you're a college athlete, your iPhone, your Blueray player, and your comic book collection?

Honestly, it's even dumber than that. It's looking at the problem of people not being able to afford health care, many of whom can't afford insurance to help pay for it, and somehow deciding the problem is that not enough people have insurance. And the solution to that? Make everyone buy insurance. And then once you've made it illegal to not have it, pat yourself on the back while you brag about the record number of people who have it now.

And the flaw in this argument is that were it not for my status as a member of a Federally recognized Native American tribe, I wouldn't be able to afford insurance. So how would it help me then to have a bill I couldn't really afford to pay mandated on me by the government?

If by "just as easily" you mean after a half-century of political campaigns eventually unified democratically legitimized governmental power behind an initiative to introduce to the US a weak shadow of what every other free Western nation has had all along, then yes, I guess with the same amount of effort and agreement from the populace, which would only come for similarly glaringly sensible cases, they could also force you to buy in to a societal scheme to prevent damage from your iPhone, just as they have done with cars, health, fire, military and criminal threats before.

What universe did that happen in, because in this one not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for Obamacare. And over here we have limited government were a majority cannot strip the minority of Constitutional rights, which includes the freedom of association. Many older folks always regarded insurance as a scam, similar to gambling or playing the numbers racket, and for religious reasons they preferred not to take part.

This transuniversal message board can get confusing at times, sorry. In my universe, the ACA was passed and held up by SCOTUS. Obviously, it might be quite different in your world.

It was passed without a single Republican vote and held up by the USSC because John Roberts rewrote the law to be a tax. Ironically, that brough up another challenge because if it's a tax then the bill had to originate in the House. Roberts did this under the theory that people should suffer the consequences of their decisions.

Well according to federal farmer, go and get a job you lazy piece of shit.

I'm sorry, were you under the impression that the GOP was a legislative branch of government?

Can you not get subsidies to help you pay for it?

CaptainX is in graduate school, you would think there mght be an inexpensive student health plan. I had such a plan when I was in grad school. Laughably cheap compared to tuition.

Usually emergency-only, but I still got several thousand dollars when I broke my feet.

In this state both CSU and UC are required to cover students with health insurance though I understand coverage is rather basic.

Didn't look like they really had anything for a white male. Being Native American allowed me to get a tax credit to knock my monthly payments down to something a lot more reasonable, though.

Yeah they do. It's based on income, not race or gender. Although I don't know how it works if you're a grad student.

And I'm saying based on my income, what came up as the monthly payment would not have been affordable to me.

Are you making below 400% of the Federal poverty level?

So you didn't have health insurance before? What would you have done in case you needed urgent expensive health care? Died, or let others pay for it by going to the ER or accepting charity from doctors?

I actually had to go to the ER once. It took me a year, but I paid that bill off.

Here's why somebody should have read the bill before they passed it.

From The Hill

Graduate students hurt by the Affordable Care Act

The IRS is penalizing universities for providing healthcare to student employees, and it’s hurting the very people the Affordable Care Act was supposed to help.

In June Forbes reported that under new IRS regulations, starting in July 2015, small businesses and universities that reimburse employees healthcare premiums or pay their health costs directly will be fined up to $36,500 a year per employee. A penalty that is 18 times greater than the $2000.00 employer mandate.

As a result, graduate students around the country are being told that they will no longer be provided healthcare as part of assistantships.
This is a clear case where government intervention, far from improving the U.S. healthcare system, has actually made things worse. Universities were providing coverage for their graduate students prior to governmental intervention and now, under the Affordable Care Act, these same universities are being forced to cancel the insurance plans they provided to students.​

More at the link.

A $36,500 fine per employee for providing health coverage?

What? You asked me a question. I can't answer it without more info.

I had to read this twice to make sure it wasn't a gturner post.

Your question suggests that you're dismissing my own personal experience out of hand. Like I didn't really go through the Marketplace website and fill in the information, and find out exactly what I would have had to pay every month depending on what plan I picked from the available providers, and noted that even the cheapest, crappiest plan would make life that much tighter for me once all my other bills had been paid. Because obviously the only way payments would be hard for me would be if I was 400% below the Federal poverty level.

Nope. Depending on what state you're in, the only way you would get subsidies would be if you were making less than 400% ABOVE Federal poverty level. I was trying to figure out if you qualified.

But now that you mention it...how could you possibly not know that if you filled out all the stuff through your marketplace website?

And what if costs had been 100x that?

He lives in one of those states that refused to start its own exchange, so he'd have had to go through the federal exchange.

Perhaps he can show us where on the HealthCare.gov site there's a box to tick for "If you're nonwhite, we got deals for you. Otherwise, you're fucked."