So I lost my health insurance today...

Yep, I "lost" "my" health insurance today. It's annual enrollment time at work! I had a whopping three options, one of which was pretty similar to the one I had this year. It'll be disappearing next year, though, and I will have to switch to a quite different plan. None of this has to do with the PPACA ("Obamacare"), of course. In fact, the law caused several positive changes in our coverage. Price increases were modest with respect to other years.

Now let's compare my hideous, awful, evil situation, which is pretty much what everyone who has employer based insurance experiences almost every year, with those poor, woeful 5,000,000 or so souls who received cancellations from their insurer and have now "lost" "their" insurance...you know, the ones Republicans are screaming bloody murder about?

Well, if they happen to be 38-year-old males residing in Ohio, like myself, they would have thirty or more choices of plans, easily found by going to sites like ehealthinsurance.com or even the now mostly-functional healthcare.gov. I happen to know how much my employer spends on health care per employee, and trust me, the prices at either of these places are very comparable to the gold/silver plan my employer provides. And of course, acceptance in these plans is guaranteed, thanks to the PPACA. They aren't the old bait-and-switch that only healthy 23-year-olds actually qualified for, which was the norm before this year.

As far as I can tell, the five million folks who have "lost" "their" insurance due to the PPACA actually have it at least as good if not better than I do, and I have what is considered good employer insurance. As always, this matter is just a tempest in a teapot. Yes, a few people will have to pay more (for generally better insurance), but just as many or more will pay less. The ACA did not re-invent actuarial tables, so while costs might get shuffled around a bit, the total remains the same.

While the PPACA is vastly less preferable than Medicare for All, or even VA for All, it is certainly better than what it replaced. It is time for Republicans to quit trying to sabotage the ship and start helping to polish it.