I have to ask, because I'm not reading through this thread to dig for it: @Shebakoby , are you talking about an issue that personally affected you or people you personally know offline, or fringe outlier cases you've heard about having happened?
Because I would run out of fingers and toes counting the people I know personally, offline, who have been screwed up in some permanent and sometimes life-threatening fashion by the old version of US healthcare or their lack of access to it, myself included.
So if you're talking outlier strangers, please have at least a frail iota of respect for those people who are living with the consequences of the nightmare you're idealizing.
@Shebakoby said:
Don't American gas prices have a huge chunk of it in tax, too? Maybe not as much as Canada, but still?
Everything here has a pile of taxes in it; that doesn't impact the behavior of companies that, once they have established that they can acquire a certain level of profit, will continue to do precisely that. Do not think for a second the companies screaming, "Oh, gov't! Bail us out! We are in trouble even though we already raised our prices!" didn't make record profits: they absolutely did. And they kept making them even when their cost dropped substantially, because it had been proven that the market would bear the new price point, which was not 'oh the gov't just added a pile of taxes', ffs. Rare is the corporation that is going to lower their price point from a level that's proven to be sustainable even if their cost drops; they will just repeat the whole process later and cry about how their 'new normal' is being threatened and we get to go through the whole rigamarole again.