I'm not American, but this happens a lot more than you'd think.
I live in Canada.
A relative of a friend actually voted for a party called "the People's party of Canada", and one of their goals as a party was to eliminate subsidized housing. That relative of my friend.... lived in subsidized housing and was not able to afford to have a home if not subsidized.
They literally voted for a party that, if they had won, would have made them homeless.
I don't think that the PPC won a single district (giving them no seats in government); much to their benefit and their disappointment.
Back when Obama made it where you couldn't be evicted and bailed out the auto industry, I had a friend that drove a car hauler. He wasn't paying his house payment and lived for free for a year, and only had a job because of the bailout. He talked mad shit about the bailout and about people living and not paying their rent. This is republikkklown logic. I was blown away and said to him, he wouldn't have a job or a place to live if it wasn't for that. He said he'd live somewhere else and get a different job.
Since then, he lives with his wife and child in his mom's house with a shit job and complains about people being on welfare. They don't get it.
You can mathematically group the people in your life in such a way so that half of the people you know are stupider than the other half.
I swear to fuckin' god, man, politics make it real easy to tell who goes in which half. It's not a perfect method, but it works at least 85% of the goddamned time.
I supported the ACA (though would’ve preferred a public option), but the one time I actually needed to use it, was for my Dad when his private insurance from his job kicked him off after retirement, the rates and coverage seemed bad, like it was just such a hassle with no great benefits. It’s only when I realized my Dad could still get Tricare that I switched over to that and that was a million times better (even more reason for govt-funded healthcare). I have no idea why my Dad hadn’t been using it the whole time either, he probably wasted tens of thousands of dollars getting private insurance. I still think ACA is a step in the right direction, BUT public option still needs to happen, Fuck Joe Lieberman for blocking that.
What they (Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, centrists) really want is emergency departments over run with patients who can't get care for chronic conditions and then they have an excuse to repeal EMTALA. At that point they'll be able to sink people deep into medical debt and when social security and Medicare/Medicaid fails to cover the costs then we can force medically disabled people into low wage jobs and take their assets to sell at pennies on the dollar to mega corps and further consolidate wealth in this country.
We should instead create a pipeline for that wealth to flow through the lower and middle class on it's way up to the top bringing the floor up and making sure basic infrastructure like medical care has the funding it needs.
This is why the GOP has fought to destroy the public education system for decades: It's way easier to manipulate poorly educated people to vote against their own interests compared to well educated people who are more likely to have learned critical thinking.
In Kansas it's a hot issue to expand ACA benefits and has widely popular support. Yet we for some reason keep on voting in Republicans whose major issues are just removing tax brackets.
Sounds like my retiree father-in-law who insists that Social Security isn’t a social service and should be the one exception to absolute abolition of all government services because they’re “communist.”
Th ACA screwed me over pretty badly. Granted my situation wasn't the target of the act (I had non-employer private insurance, and the price more than tripled due to ACA requirements).
I don't like trump at all, but I agree with scrapping this plan and creating something better.
You can dislike a policy and still be forced to live under it.
I have no choice but to use the American health care system, and I know how shitty it is, especially given the fact that Obama had a supermajority for a time and could have implemented universal health care. Few things will anger me as quickly as someone saying we have 'access' to health care when that supposed access is largely contingent on whether or not you can afford to be price-gouged.