Obamacare skeptics and opponents took a hit Tuesday when President Barack Obama announced the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) met its goal of seven million signups by Monday night’s deadline with 100,000 to spare — 7.1 million.
“The debate over repealing this law is over,” Obama declared.
That, of course, is wishful thinking on the President’s part.
The debate will not end, particularly in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, which has voted many times over to repeal the law, knowing fully well that move would fail in the Democratically-controlled Senate.
As a professional skeptic, I have a lot of questions about our current President, but that skepticism does not include the Patrient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ACA and/or Obamacare) because it allows my wife to finally get the health insurance she needed to get overdue help on fixing a back injury suffered at work three years ago.
Virginia’s less-than-employee-friendly worker protection laws and an employer who took advantage of every loophole it could find left her without the insurance she needed to deal with the problem. The company even employed a little-known trick in the “Cobra” law that is supposed to allow former employees to keep their health plan and her insurance was canceled by Blue Cross.
Health insurance companies turned her down repeatedly because of the “pre-existing” back condition. The cheapest plan she could find would cost more than $3,000 a month for a single plan since, my age, I was on Medicare with supplemental.
Yet one of the insurance companies that turned her down just six months ago now insures her under the ACA, which took effect on January 1 of this year, and at any rate far lower than what was quoted midway through last year. For three months now, she has been getting the help she needs and the insurance company is footing the bill.
The plan works for her. For us, Obamacare is a program that delivers what is promised and is affordable.
Of course, that puts us at odds who base their opposition to the plan not from personal experience but, instead, to accepting political propaganda as fact.
6 thoughts on “Obamacare works at our house”
This is a wonderful plan for those previously uninsurable. It’s not so good for those who were carrying their own policies previously. An aquaintance has a small business. In order to afford health insurance, they continued to increase their deductible. Last year their deductible was 10,000. They received a cancelation notice this past summer. Their policy was non compliant under ACA. She is in WV. State law requires all women regardless of age to carry maternity insurance. Their premiums doubled and they still have a 10K deductible.
The number of people who “lost coverage” are probably about the usual number of people who have to go looking for other insurance when insurers decided to dump the policy or group they were in. I’ve been employed at the same place for the last 10 years, and we have had to change plans and insurers several times over that period.
Doug, care to share what dollar amount “affordable” is for your wife’s plan?
I’m just curious if the existing condition plans run higher than the “regular” plans on the exchanges. Of course you aren’t obligated to share.
The pre-existing condition clause is probably the largest success of the ACA and is the most cited reason to like the law.
I hope you don’t get sticker shock next year when the government can’t lie about the number of those signing up anymore. It’s hard to trust the government numbers when all they are telling us is the website enrollment and not the actual number of people paying for and getting insurance. The insurance companies are claiming roughly half of enrollments from the websites turn into paying customers.
It’s really sad if one stops to think about it. We changed an insurance system that was working for 300,000,000 people to try to sign up 30,000,000 more and only got supposedly 7,000.000 to actually sign up. No one knows how many of the 7 million were part of the 5 million that lost coverage, so it might have only benefited 2 million people. If you don’t believe the government sign up numbers and use the insurance company estimates, then it’s a net loss of 1.5 million insured Americans.
If this is success I’d hate to see failure.
Somebody’s footing the bill, and if there’s one thing insurance companies are good at it’s passing off the costs to everyone else. Plus their profit, and those of their salarymen.
‘s why we pay tax – So everyone gets cops and military protection and stuff like that. I just wish there wasn’t a profit motive included.
Jon
If I’d added my wife to my employer’s insurance plan, it would have cost me about an extra $350 per month. She found the exact same plan from the same company on the exchange for $140 per month. So yeah, it works for me too.
I think your experience is not all that uncommon. The Republicans that have gone all-in on repealing the program will increasingly have to deal with personal experiences that differ from their apocalyptic predictions.
Of course the savvy Republicans already knew that, which is why they shut down the government and bet the farm on killing it before implementation. Now, voting en-mass to repeal it is a suicide mission and leaves them w/o any real platform for 2014/2016 other than screwing people over. It will be a very hard sell, I think. Obamacare repeal has been touted as the Republican’s magic bullet. I don’t think that will be the case.
It has been clear for some time that the Republicans really knew deep down that the program would work and would not fall of its own weight. The last time they fought a death match on an issue like this was Social Security. The unqualified success of that program put the Republicans out of power in the house for 40 years. The ACA has a similar potential downside for them.
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