How Obamacare fails my family

What’s the problem with the Affordable Care Act? Well, the health “care” it requires us to sign up for is overpriced and sucks, a crappy product forced on the public by the coercive power of the state to benefit a monopolistic industry that remains fundamentally out of control.

Cost is everything in this game. And because the ACA was crafted to satisfy ravenous profit-driven interests — because President Obama in his albeit noble urge to reform health care failed to institute the one reform that really matters, regulating with an iron fist these greedy bastards — the citizen is the one who pays the cost.

So, thanks a lot, Obama. All we wanted was cheap socialist medicine like they have in backwaters such as, you know, the entire developed world.

I know all this is common knowledge for most of you, but I finally got a bitter taste of it this week when at last, sick of the “individual mandate” fines I’ve been made to pay year after year — I’m self-employed, a freelance writer — I went to Healthcare.gov to sign up.

I was redirected to New York State’s health marketplace website. It’s junk. The links don’t seem to work. It crashes. The financial help calculator won’t calculate.

As I’m about to throw my laptop across the room, I call the help line (855-355-5777, if you’re interested in completely losing your mind). There’s no help, of course. I’m on hold for quite a while, hopelessly.

So it’s back to the website, which appears to be functioning now. I get a quote. The cheapest of the programs, provided by something called Fidelis Care, is $400 a month and up.

The terms are lousy. A $4,000 deductible, for starters. If I add my daughter, who is 5 years old, the price is $800 a month.

The level and quality of care for that price? Miserly, begrudging and incompetent: So I’m told by those who’ve signed up with Fidelis.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: I have about $1,000 in savings at the moment.

I have a few checks coming in. But things are tight.

Can I afford $800 a month for crap service? That’s almost $10,000 a year. Some years, my net income isn’t much more (I live frugally — presently I’ll be in a wall tent in the Catskill Mountains; at least there’s a wood stove).

The problem is that I gross too much to get subsidies to pay the rip-off prices of the health providers — that is, to have my tax dollars subsidize a vicious and corrupt industry. And that also means I can’t qualify for Medicaid. So I’m stuck in the vast middle for whom the ACA did next to nothing to help.

More back of the envelope calculations: Given my relatively low income, the fines — which are pegged to income — are a lot less than $10,000 a year. Getting fined starts to sound like the smart move.

I lived in France in the 1990s. That’s where my first daughter was born. She is now grown and out in the world and healthy and happy.

Know how health care worked for her and her family there? Easily. Everyone has it — basically Medicaid for all. Socialist medicine! No greasy “marketplace,” no vampiric middleman insurance companies, no preying on sick people for a cash return.

And all this means that in France there’s none of the incessant, soul-sucking, mind-poisoning worry that goes into figuring out whether you’ll be properly covered, whether you’ll end up bankrupt because your body fails.

Of course, there’s a sizable bureaucracy to manage the French system, as in all publicly-run social welfare complexes, and at times it’s unwieldy and a pain in the ass to navigate. But it’s nothing compared with the privatized health bureaucracy that burdens the United States, that complicates our lives needlessly, that renders what should be a basic human right — health — into a commodity.

So what to do? I’ll tell you what to do: Obama, Congress, the ACA, the medical industry and the HMOs can go to hell. I’ll pay the fines.