Affordable Health Care

Like most of you, probably like everybody, I've been hearing a lot about how difficult it is to access the Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchanges on the internet.  The other day, I decided to try it for myself to see how bad it really was.  

To my surprise, I got right on.  Registering was no problem - I waited a little longer for the message to confirm my email address than I would have liked (I wanted it right away), but no longer than I would have had to wait for almost any functioning commercial site, certainly less time than American Express apparently needs to confirm a changed password.

The rest of the application loaded fine.  A few times there were minor, 5- or 10-second delays, but within 30 minutes of logging on, I was at the exchange, successfully comparing insurance rates for the various plans available.

Now here's the bad part.  The plans are terrible.  President Obama was on television saying how frustrated he was with the technical problems because the product was good and he wanted people to have access to it, but I'm here telling you the product is awful, as in awfully expensive.  The cheapest plan available was considerably more than what I'm paying now on the free market ($350/month), and prices went from there up to the near-four-figure-per-month level.

Granted, I saved some money on the free market by raising the deductible and out-of-pocket costs, and all of the plans on the exchange had lower deductibles and out-of-pockets than I have now, but isn't the whole point of selection being able to choose the right balance for you between cost and benefit?

Worse still, there were only two providers for all of the plans offered, one of which was an HMO, and none of the plans included dental or eye care, which are included in my $350/month policy.

I'm disappointed.  Honestly, I was hoping to report the exact opposite here, that I just got a great rate for high-quality health insurance from the exchange.  The President talked about plans that were "about the cost of your cell-phone bill," but if you're ringing up $450/month in phone bills, then you probably can afford the ACA insurance policies.   

I didn't qualify for any subsidies or assistance, so perhaps that's why I didn't see any plans around the $100/month level.  If that's the reason, then it may simply be that the insurance exchanges are a good thing for some people, but not for me.  Like a lot of subsidized government programs (SNAP, Medicaid), there may still be merit to it, even if I'm not the recipient of the benefits. 

In other words, if you're fortunate enough to be employed and to get health insurance from your employer, then stick with that.  If you don't qualify for the subsidies in the ACA, then you're best off buying health insurance on the open market.  But if you do qualify for assistance, then there are some low-deductible plans on the insurance exchanges available to you, and I'm glad we finally have a national program to make that happen.  

I just don't see the benefit of buying those plans without the subsidies, and that kind of disappoints me.