Is The Affordable Care Act Fundamentally Evil?

My insurance premium for January 2015 will be $479. This is up 18% from my 2014 insurance premium of $407 and up 54% from my 2011 premium of $311. Your mileage may vary but this is the good news! If I was foolish enough to purchase health insurance from the exchange in 2015 the lowest cost bronze plan will cost $923 and my potential out of pocket costs zoomed up from $5,000 to $12,000. For a person who has not made a claim against my health insurance since the mid 1990s, the idea of paying $479 a month is revolting. The idea of paying $923 a month is beyond comprehension. I was the perfect health insurance customer. I was happy even though I was arguably getting ripped off. My existing health insurance plan was being paid by my employer and even though this was not the perfect situation, my employer was happy and my family was happy. In those days my life was simple. I could spend my waking hours on the important things in life. Not surprisingly this situation was not that different from 1976 when  health insurance was simple, transparent, and well understood. Boy, have we screwed up a good thing! In those day health insurance was the ultimate no-brainer and everyone signed up. Now we ponder to what happened to the Do No Harm philosophy to health insurance? Today I feel that I have been drug into a fight I never supposed to be fighting. Courtesy of the Affordable Care Act my employer cannot use the Health Reimbursement Act to pay for my health insurance with pre-tax money. It is just another one of those unintended ACA consequences. My employer is trying to be compassionate in a difficult business environment and will give me a bonus in 2014 to try to overcome the dysfunctionality of the Affordable Care Act. Recently I was reminded by Professor Gruber that Affordable Care Act supporters have always been negotiating in bad faith with the healthy people who were supporting the health care system. Quite succinctly he reminded us that the Affordable Care Act was never about health care reform, it was about politics. Six years later and 21,000 pages later we are still trying to figure out how to bend the health care cost curve. If increased federalism cannot reduce health care costs in six years, we have to conclude it will never reduce health care costs. Now the healthy crowd is stuck with a “fool me one, shame on me” mentality. If repeating the same old thing over and over again and expecting a different result is a sign of insanity, what can we do to reform the Affordable Care Act except to let it suffer through a slow, miserable death? Are we doomed to re-live the TennCare debacle all over again. Our health care system was better six years ago and even better 30 years ago. We are going in the wrong direction. I can see a trend and the Affordable Care Act is fundamentally evil.