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I can agree with more competition: but what seemed appealing about Obamacare was moving towards universal coverage. Many other rich countries have more or less universal health coverage so you can't be "too poor" to get medical treatment for illnesses, up to a point.

Re: premiums rising in the past few years: I think it's because Obamacare covers "preventive care" on top of the usual healthcare costs? In the long-term preventive care should reduce the total costs, but in the short term it would represent a sudden increase in premiums. The other issues might be the extra requirements e.g. computerized records and such, again these are long-term investments which cost money now. [www.thebalance.com]

I actually work in healthcare so I have a bit more of an understanding of the health insurance system than most.

One thing you don't get about US health insurers before Obamacare is that *THERE WAS NO REQUIREMENT THEY GIVE COVERAGE TO ANYBODY*. So long story short, the private health insurers would ONLY accept profitable clientele (young, healthy, and rich people) while denying people with "pre-existing conditions" (i.e. the only people who needed health insurance - the poor, the sick, the elderly) - these people would be kicked to the curb and had to rely on Emergency Rooms as their primary form of care (which are legally bound to treat you without asking for your credit card first). This created a whole mess in healthcare where the young and healthy and rich got great deals, while everybody else was dumped onto Medicare and Hospitals who ended up footing the bill for everything. Essentially, health insurers were parasites who took only the profitable stuff and dumped the people who actually needed them on somebody else. It was a hugely regressive system designed to make wealthy shareholders richer than ever while adding NOTHING of benefit to actual health providers - the State literally took on all the "risk" while they took on all the "reward". It got so bad the government had to cap earnings on health insurance companies to 10% - otherwise they had far too much incentive to deny legitimate claims and engage in other shady behavior to pad their profit margins further.

Obamacare was designed to solve this problem, and it did so very well. In the process, the health insurance companies became a LOT less profitable. They mitigate this issue by increasing premiums, but the OVERALL cost of the system is far better and more equitable. Emergency Rooms, for example, are no longer the unprofitable money-sucking black holes they were before the ACA, when they had to bear a lot of the treatment costs themselves - as a result, more and more hospitals can afford to open ERs, and the ERs got nicer with better equipment and more qualified personnel. While you are likely to pay more in health premiums overall, your grandma is less likely to get denied by three insurers and ignored by her existing insurer, resulting in your family having to pay the entirety of the radiation treatment she's getting alone. Etc and so forth.