Much has been said about the turmoil surrounding Obamacare for 2018, but what is it like to try to sign up and what does it cost?
I tried entering my family’s data on Healthcare.gov to find out as the Dec. 15 deadline approaches.
The general conclusion: The marketplace plans are expensive if you don’t qualify for government subsidies and provide poor benefits. Did we expect anything else at this point from a program that has been a costly disaster from the beginning?
The good part, I suppose, is that the website actually works now. It was a mess when it launched a few years ago, based on many news reports and my personal experience. It still takes a long time to fill out all the forms – I would guess an hour or so of tedious clicking before you can find out how much it’s going to cost – but I didn’t experience any glitches.
The site mainly asks how many dependents you have and your income. But being the government, it requires a lot of repetitive, unnecessary steps to get to those seemingly simple answers. And in the end, our income didn’t qualify us for a tax credit or premium subsidy.
After that, I was finally able to see how much it would cost.
All 82 countis only have one provider, Magnolia Health, through the exchange in 2018. In 2017 many counties, including Marion, had two providers.
Generally, the less competition, the higher the prices. That seems to be the case here. A bronze plan – the lowest available – would cost my family a $1,234 monthly premium along with a $13,100 deductible and $13,100 out-of-pocket maximum. From what I can tell from the always-confusing medical benefits summary, it would not really provide any real coverage, even for routine visits, until we hit the deductible. It estimates the total yearly costs for us under that plan to be $15,783.
I’ll remind you that we’re a young family of four with few medical problems. And Obamacare was supposed to solve health care in this country? What a sad joke.
Other plans for silver or gold offered better service that included a co-pay for prescription drugs and doctor’s visits, but they ranged in cost from an estimated $15,927 to $21,288 per year. Suffice it to say, I don’t have that kind of change lying around.
Clearly, very few Mississippians, if any, are going to buy plans at that price. The question is how much would they cost if you had a lower income that qualified for subsidies?
Those “working poor” who make too much for Medicaid but don’t get insurance offered through work are who Obamacare was made for in the first place. I’m not sure because you can’t plug in theoretical numbers on the website to check costs. It makes you digitally sign a sworn statement saying the information you entered is true to the best of your knowledge.
It all adds up to frustration. I realize that no one has any better ideas about how to fix our country’s health insurance debacle. That’s why all of the Republican alternatives have fallen by the wayside; they haven’t been able to figure out the “replace” part of “repeal and replace” Obamacare.
All I’m left with is this ancient wisdom from Ecclesiastes, “Behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun.” n
Reach C-P Editor Charlie Smith at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
