The money goes into the health insurance ‘pot’. You are paying for a larger crowd, who previously didn’t have coverage because they had serious health conditions. Toss on hospital overages...covering costs where people show up with zero coverage and never pay their bill. Then toss on legal situations that hospitals worry about. Then toss on drug profits for the commercial companies.
The problem is that when they said they needed to make it affordable...they skipped about a hundred things to lessen the cost and yearly rises. The basic problems that existed ten years ago....still continue, and impact cost.
My brother noted the newest issue....if you get into a car accident and they call for the air ambulance...that’s a minimum of $12k, and could rise to $40k depending on how far they need to fly you. Most insurance packages have a limit. So you could wake up in the hospital...find out you were flown, and then a month later come to realize that your insurance is only going to cover $10k of that...the rest you pay. This could be a fair chunk of money.
Limiting the exposure of insurance companies is the only way to price it accurately; your car insurance company wouldn’t sell you a policy for $2,000 if they could be forced to pay out $10 million, but that is what is happening to health insurance companies. While they can require co-payments and mandate deductibles, how do they factor in the cost of serious illness/injuries that are basically open-ended in terms of the company’s financial exposure?
Years ago (before ObamaCare) we took one of our children to the hospital for an injury from riding a bike; the insurance company immediately started pressing us to see if there was someone they could sue to recover their cost (which wasn’t very high anyway). On top of that, we’ve created a legal atmosphere where healthcare providers are sued constantly for “missing” something - so they have to test for EVERYTHING; that has a cost as well.