ACA isn't panacea it's cracked up to be

As a former recruiter in the health insurance industry, and for someone who has been negatively impacted by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) personally, I take issue with the Guest Opinion written by Zelda Geyer-Sylvia published in this paper on Sept. 14. Ms. Geyer-Sylvia is president and CEO of Blue Cross of Idaho, a former client of mine. Read her piece closely and you'll see that it is essentially an advertisement touting her company and open enrollment this fall. It appears that the ACA has been good for Ms. Geyer-Sylvia's company. As she aptly points out, 2014 enrollment was so good that Idaho ranks No. 3 in the nation per capita for enrollees. We should all be pleased, right?

Wrong. The downside of Ms. Geyer-Sylvia's optimism is illustrated in my personal situation. I was a small business owner for 11 years, supporting a family and making sure we were all covered by health insurance every year until 2014. In 2014, when the ACA took effect, my husband and I were in disbelief when we learned our health insurance premiums had doubled, for benefits worth less to us than our old "crappy" (President Obama's term, not mine) plan that the ACA outlawed.

We liked our old crappy plan. In fact, to us, it wasn't crappy at all. It was at least a good-enough plan. It certainly wasn't gold-plated but was a good value for health services we used and needed.

My problem with the ACA is that it is run by politicians. As sure as the sun rises, we will all come to appreciate that the health plans before ACA were based on objective measures tied to the reality of people like you and me, not tied to politically expedient outcomes. The old plans may not have been perfect, but at least they were based on objective data derived by scientific means, not political ones.

Given that we live in a world of limited resources where allocation of those resources is the driver of wealth and prosperity, do others wonder, as I do, about the long-term effects of a system that forces the anonymous taxpayer to subsidize the cost of someone else's health troubles, then doubles the cost of the able-person's premium? Haven't we already gone beyond giving a leg-up to those in need and reached the point of enabling the shiftless, immoral, and imprudent amongst us? Where do we draw the line between generosity and gullibility?

I don't envy Ms. Geyer-Sylvia's position of responsibility in the present political climate. I can only hope that people like her, savvy in the ways of health care economics and politics, are aware that there are other shareholders to this healthcare debate who don't seem to be speaking out, at least yet. I can only hope that it doesn't take some catastrophic healthcare event before any of us gain the courage to stand up for our right to not be made slaves to the healthcare conditions of others.

Health insurance is a complex product, and the public debate surrounding the ACA is complex. It would be helpful if Ms. Geyer-Sylvia could go to bat for the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people like myself who are forced to pay for others' but can't afford their own health insurance, before this new entitlement crumbles under its own weight.

I'd like to leave this discussion with the following quote from Abraham Lincoln:

"I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else." - March 6, 1860, speech at New Haven, Conn.

Leslie Macomber serves as legal administrator at Macomber Law, PLLC, in Coeur d'Alene.