Skip to main content

This is what happened when I went to healthcare.gov to sign up for health insurance

Today in the mail I received a letter from my private health insurance company informing me that my current policy, which was being cancelled because it didn't meet minimum standards of the new healthcare law, would actually be available to me next year. In other words, I could keep my plan.

There has been a big kerfluffle about a presidential promise to allow people to keep their health insurance plans if they liked them, which turned out not to be true under the health care law. Having read the law I thought that was pretty clear. I figured that my plan wasn't compliant and I would therefore find myself signed up for some more expensive policy by my health insurance company when 2014 rolled in. I am not entirely sure why the president told people they could keep their non-compliant policies, and apparently he has been spanked soundly for saying it. The "Keep your health plan act of 2013" passed the house in November, but I cannot find anywhere that it passed the senate, and now I have received a letter that suggests I can keep my health plan. I find nothing online to explain this confusing set of contradictions.

But all of that aside, I decided today that I would plunge into what is supposed to be a horribly broken system for obtaining health insurance. The process sounded interesting a month or two ago, but I was way too busy to explore it. Today, though, my schedule cleared out a touch and I got the letter from my insurance company, so I decided to give it a whirl. And...

It was fine. There was no problem.

First I went to the website for Idaho's health exchange as the letter from my insurance company instructed. Since Idaho has been grouchy about anything to do with the healthcare law, we are not quite yet functional as a state exchange. The website routed me to the federal health insurance exchange via healthcare.gov. There I expected horrible bugs and delays. I don't doubt that people have had terrible bugs and delays, but today things went as smoothly as a greased watermelon in a warm lagoon. The website was attractive and uncluttered, the fonts were easy to read and the navigation was fast. I signed up for an account. I entered my name, the names of my children, social security numbers, and attested to our citizenship and the fact that we didn't smoke. I promised that I was telling the truth. I was then routed to a page of options for health plans, categorized by level of coverage. Coverage is either bronze, silver or gold, depending on how much the plan pays and how much I pay to have the plan. I went for bronze level since I expect to die suddenly after experiencing perfect health all of my life, and figure that my children will be well until they are kicked off my plan at age 26. I am willing to bet my $12,500 out of pocket maximum on it, and have a health savings account with something like that amount of money in it, should I lose my bet. I had 6 choices of plans, offered by a variety of different companies and chose the cheapest which was about $25 more expensive than this year's non-compliant health plan that I was invited to keep. My experience with my present insurance company involves a yearly price hike of around 20%, so this increase in cost was in no way disappointing.

Having signed up for insurance in the past, I'd have to say this experience was better. If I had been less financially well off, I would have also had a break on price, which would have been nice.

I don't know what to say about the failed roll out of the Affordable Care Act other than the fact that at this present moment it works fine. Will it destroy American health care as we know it or cause an already overburdened system to implode? That remains to be seen. Will coverage for preventive care dramatically reduce costs by improving the overall health of Americans? Not sure. But on Monday, December 16, 2013 at 5 PM the process of comparing and purchasing a health insurance policy was easy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce...
40 comments
Read more

Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from harmful drugs, foods, even tobacco products, has said that there is not good evidence of ivermectin's safety and effectiveness in treating Covid 19, and that just about sums up what we truly know about ivermectin in the context of Covid. The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, a branch of the department of Health and Human Services, tasked with preventing and treating disease and injury, also recently warned  people not to use ivermectin to treat Covid outside of actual clinical trials. Certain highly qualified physicians, including ones who practice critical care medicine and manage many patients with severe Covid infections in the intensive care unit vocally support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid and have published dosing schedules and reviews of the literature supporting...
1 comment
Read more

Actinic Keratoses and Carac (fluorouracil) cream: why is this so expensive?

First, a disclaimer: I don't know why Carac (0.5% flourouracil cream) is so expensive. I will speculate, though, at the very end of this blog. Sun and the skin: what happens If a person reaches a certain age, has very little pigment in her skin, and has spent lots of time in the sun, bad stuff happens. The ultraviolet radiation of the sun does all kinds of great things: it makes us happy, causes us to synthesize vitamin D which strengthens our bones and it gives us this healthy glow until we get old and wrinkled and leathery. And even that can be charming. The skin cells put up with this remarkably well for a long time, partly aided by melanin pigment which absorbs the radiation, which is why we tan and freckle, if we are fair skinned. Eventually, though, we absorb enough radiation that it injures the skin and produces cells which multiply oddly. It also damages the skin's elasticity which creates wrinkles. The cells which reproduce in odd ways peel, creating dry skin or...
26 comments
Read more