<p>Just for the record, I’m not recommending what anyone should do. I’m just pointing out that, to many people, paying thousands and thousands of dollars for a health insurance policy and STILL having to pay health care bills out of pocket is going to be very confusing and unattractive. Many people who will legitimately ask, “Why am I being forced to buy this, again?” :)</p>
<p>I understand the importance of catastrophic coverage. That’s why I have health insurance. Or, I should say, HAD health insurance until I got the letter informing me that I can’t keep my coverage.</p>
<p>Some people (I don’t mean people in this thread, just regular unsophisticated people) don’t understand how insurance works. They don’t grasp that if some subscribers end up having catastrophes and get a lot MORE than they paid in, necessarily most people will get less than they paid in. When people whine that they paid all this insurance and got little for their money, I always want to say, “I’ll set your house on fire if it’ll make you feel better.”</p>
<p>the fact that there are no lifetime caps on these plans must be one reason for higher rates. Naturally, it’s frustrating to be told you can’t keep your current lower cost coverage, but as many have already pointed out we need to be realistic when evaluating those lower cost plans. So many of them barely covered anything. I’ve seen folks file for bankruptcy over medical bills, and become despondent dealing with the combination of health and financial strain.</p>
<p>But it’s about balance. When the cost of insuring your life starts to cut to deeply into the cost of living your life it gets tricky. We don’t know yet if that’ll happen to too many people and this ACA thing is really random state by state. And, I’m expecting more changes. We’ll see.</p>
<p>My current plan covers everything the new exchange plans cover. It has no lifetime caps. No annual caps. It is, for all intents and purposes, the catastrophic plan offered on the exchange in my state. It covers preventative care (although in practice, for me, none of these plans cover the biggie: colonoscopies). It does cover my annual physical with no deductable, just like the exchange plans – although the cholesterol blood test is not covered because years ago I had high cholesterol. Now, my cholesterol is low enough to get the preferred rates on health insurance, but I’m still logged in the computer as being stricken with “hypercholesterolemia”. So cholesterol testing is “medical management”, not “preventative screening” – something a lot of people are going to find out when they find out that “preventative care” is not really covered by their new ACA policies like they were told… </p>
<p>To be honest, I don’t fully understand why I can’t keep it, but when the government and Blue Cross/Blue Shield says I can’t keep it, I’m pretty sure that I can’t keep it!</p>
<p>If I can figure out a way to buy the catastrophic plan, that’s what I will do. If I can’t, I’ll buy the cheapest Bronze plan. If I can buy either of them direct from Anthem rather than through the exchange, I’ll do that.</p>
<p>I’m pretty creeped out about the thought that your personal data may not be well protected if you sign up for one of the ACA plans. Think of all the information you’re giving them, it’s not just a credit card.</p>
<p>That said, I wouldn’t let my kids go a day without insurance. If they couldn’t afford to pay, I’d pay for them. The potential for damage is way too great.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, your plan was cheap because people with pre-existing conditions couldn’t buy it. And you can’t keep it because if well people can just buy catastrophic insurance and switch to better insurance when they get sick the system won’t work</p>
<p>Yes, but we heard over and over that if you like your plan you can keep it. Period. So this issue could become a bit of a glitch if it happens to many people who can’t just suck it up. I’m in observation mode.</p>
<p>Right. Or at least they would have had a waiting period for coverage on some things. More importantly, people who weren’t as healthy as I am couldn’t get the preferred rate. I had to wait for a yay or nay when I applied and it was a significant discount. Bully for me. I’ve worked pretty diligently to get this healthy.</p>
<p>One thing I’ve got to do is get with my insurance agent and find out if there are still preferred rate deals on the non-exchange plans. I’m just trying to figure out the system well enough to even ask the right questions.</p>
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<p>I don’t like the information insurance companies have in our health records either. You have to be very careful what you discuss with your doctor because once a “diagnosis” of a condition goes on that health record, it’s never coming off. But, take a gander at the types of organizations being approved as Navigators (national health insurance agents). Scary.</p>
What data? The insurance companies used to insist on you providing your entire medical history – you’d end up working with an agent who would need to go over the form to see whether there were any issues that might cause problems getting your application approved. </p>
<p>The only info going through the exchange applications is basic demographic stuff, your social security numbers (which was always given to insurance companies – up until about a dozen years ago, they used to use patient’s SS numbers as the policy number, so every time you went to fill a prescription, you’d be handing over a card with your social on it(. — plus minimal financial info, much less than you’d put on a mortgage application. And you don’t have to supply the financial info unless you want to apply a subsidy.</p>
<p>I don’t know your personal situation, but if it is an individual plan and got it after the passage date of ACA, or made any significant changes to a previous plan like opting for a higher deductible – then it can’t be grandfathered. </p>
<p>Here’s the logic: once ACA passed, if insurance companies could have created new plans, or people could have bought into plans – and have plans achieve grandfathered status, that would have created an opportunity for insurers to create and market new plans to lock in healthy subscribers in a way that would have undermined ACA. </p>
<p>I’m not grandfathered on the plan that I had, but others are – including an insurance agent I’ve worked with. The rates on that grandfathered plan are going up too. So if you hadn’t gotten a letter telling you that your plan was being discontinued, you very likely would have gotten a letter with a rate increase to a level that is higher than what you are seeing on the exchange.</p>
<p>I hope this encourages a renewed look at health costs. They’re too high, and we need to figure out ways to bring them down. It’s not a simple problem and there will not be a simple solution, but we need to nibble away at different aspects of the cost crisis.</p>
<p>As near as I can tell, the only reason I can’t keep my plan is that it doesn’t fall under the grandfather rules. It’s not because it differs in any substantive way from an ACA compliant plan. As near as i can tell, the actual coverages and so forth are completely ACA compliant. I don’t actually see any difference between the whole array of exchange plans and the array of individual plans I compared at Anthem a couple of years ago. The pricing is pretty similar, too. The only difference is that the bureaucratic rule that Bronze plans have to pay out 60% of an “average” person’s health care means that they have to offer a slightly lower deductible and charge a little more compared to my plan. The catastrophic plan on the exchange is actually a little cheaper than my plan, presumably because they can’t charge as much of a geezer penalty (thanks to all the 20-something kiddos that will be forced to buy insurance and subsidize me).</p>
<p>Compared to the already preposterous pricing in the individual insurance market, the exchange prices aren’t much different. Why would they be? It’s the same product sold by the same company. I’m not really sure what problem the exchanges were supposed to fix, really.</p>
<p>When I signed up for insurance in the spring, I had to answer some 100 questions about my health and my family’s health. No exaggeration. </p>
<p>The health insurance exchange sign up was an absolute breeze compared to that. PLUS, I don’t have to wait on pins and needles for weeks while the insurance company decides whether or not they’re going to bother to insure me. There’s nothing that healthcare.gov has about me that BCBS doesn’t already have… and BCBS has one HECK of a lot more.</p>
The problem of the thousands of other people who weren’t as healthy as you or I who were either being charged triple the “preferred” rates that we were paying, or were being sold insurance that specifically excluded treatment for they were most likely to need treatment for, or couldn’t get insurance at all.</p>
<p>2) The problem that health care costs are so high and the distribution of wealth is so skewed that two-thirds or more of Americans have incomes that are less than 400% of the federal poverty line, and simply don’t have discretionary income to spend on health insurance. The exchanges are a way of managing a system to subsidized the purchase of insurance for those families. </p>
<p>There are other, different way that those two problems could have been solved, but the problem is that there was a continually growing number of uninsured and uninsurable people - and those were the very people who are most in need of insurance. Something needed to be done to stem that tide.</p>