There has been so much smoke and bile over the front-end application process for the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) that a lot of things have gotten completely lost:
This act really only affects people who did not have healthcare coverage before, or whose employers have recently dropped it. Unfortunately the latter group has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last decade (pre-ACA) as the death panels (excuse me...health insurance companies) entrenched their abilities to buy new yachts and vacation homes every year through premium and deductible increases, while providing no real cost control to the market.
It got so bad that the US was the worst (the worst, bar none) of any 'first-world' or 'civilized' country in providing very basic healthcare to its citizens. You could have moved to almost any one of 80 or so other countries (including some 'second world' countries and done better).
The other thing that has gotten lost aside from just availability is the advantages the ACA brings to the healthcare consumer. Unfortunately it does not get rid of the death panel's influence and greed, only requiring that everyone be allowed to be gored by the political money-grabbing lobbyist and health care profit machine equally hard. The right thing, of course would be a single-payer system like the rest of the civilized world enjoys, but that would put one of the largest money sources for Congressional reelection campaigns out of business (boo-hoo).
Still, it means that there is likely to be a much smaller percentage of completely uninsured citizens in the US, which should serve to drive down costs once hospitals start to realize that the majority of people walking into their emergency rooms are no longer largely made up those that cannot/are not going to pay.
This column from the Center For Public Integrity outlines just how much real information you may have missed by just watching cable news:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/23/14051/obamacare-yes-theres-plenty-it-you
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