non political - anyone else screwed by healthcare marketplace?

zero political content, just the facts that happened to me.

last year i qualified for $156 in assistance per month to my insurance through the marketplace.

this year, nothing changed in my income, i have another dependent, and they tell me i qualify for $23 a month in assistance.

last year they had a pretty helpful chat option which gave me a million times more help than calling them on the phone.

this year the only option they show for help is to call them. that got me nowhere last year.

i have no idea where the $133 went, why it went, or who it went to.

i'm going to explore off marketplace options, but right now the $325 penalty for not having insurance is looking more attractive than paying $200 a month for a crap plan with a $6500 deductible that my doctor probably won't even be able to take because the Cleveland Clinic is supposedly going to accept no marketplace plans this year. before the "affordable care act" i was paying $65 a month for a crap plan with $6500 deductible that my doctor actually took.

My sister and her husband and their two kids are taking a beating. They are paying more per month for a $5000 deductible plan as they were for a $20 copay plan had to change doctors.

Yep, we're screwed too. Ours is going from $800 a month to $1100 a month.

i've seen a lot of complaints about this among my facebook friends.. my mom just retired and she is in limbo because of the law: state says she needs to go thru the feds, feds say she needs to go thru the state- that kind of thing.

i've got decent insurance thru work, so i don't really have any firsthand experience with the Obamacare stuff other than to say that i hope it all gets shot down at the Supreme Court.

We are not getting any help due to/from the affordable care act. SWMBO does not qualify for assistance due to my employer offering coverage, that coverage costs twice as much as a personal plan, and that plan is not cheap close to $300 a month for crap insurance. The only good I have seen is the no more pre-existing condition denial aspect.

I can't be the only one having limits of self control tested trying to not post a big fat " I TOLD YOU SO " in this thread.

In reply to ronholm:

No, you aren't.

Toyman01 wrote: In reply to ronholm: No, you aren't.

You Really aren't alone. (clenches teeth and tries to keep from screaming.)

LopRacer wrote:

Toyman01 wrote: In reply to ronholm: No, you aren't.

You Really aren't alone. (clenches teeth and tries to keep from screaming.)

Our copay a few years ago was $500 per year total, now it's $5000 @ per year

I'm sure this too, is Bush's fault

I haven't met any working class person its helped. In my old job, I topped out at nearly 11 bucks an hour and didn't qualify for ANY assistance.

Those who peruse my drivel on a regular basis 1) really need some help and 2) will recall that I am not a fan of government interference in anything.

I have recently come to the conclusion that not only was the ACA poorly conceived and poorly written, we as a nation are at the point where about the only thing that makes sense any more is a single payer system.

In reply to Curmudgeon:

Which is what they wanted you to decide when they wrote this screwed up travesty of legislation. If I was Obama, I'd call that a success.

At my place of employment we are dealing with Transitional Reinsurance Fees.

TRF is a fee charged Employer plans to subsidize the Marketplace and bring stabilization to the costs.

I have read those fees are going to be over a billion, with a B, just this year alone.

Just wait for when employers have a cap on benefits provided and if they go over, it's a 40% "Cadillac" tax per dollar......

It did make it a bit easier to have a kid this year with privately bought insurance - pregnancy riders for those are very expensive and hard to get. Trouble is, now they're expensive and impossible to refuse. I'm sure we would have found some other way to game the system, if the ACA hadn't passed. It did take about a month to create an account on the site and about two months from first application to making it through the bureaucratic maze and actually getting a new insurance plan because the federal and state government were having a "no, YOU cover this!" fight.

Planning on changing from a gold plan (because of Mrs. Mad Scientist's pregnancy) to a silver this year. Haven't been able to figure out what the cost will be because the supposedly new and improved site still crashes every time I try to use it. Looks like the claim that they'd fixed the site is in the same league as "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

Somehow we've made the problems of some into the problems of many. Instead of the lack of healthcare completely screwing people with chromic conditions or those underinsured who had an emergency, it's now slowly screwing everyone participating. The system was always broken, but now it's broken for more people in smaller ways. If all they wanted to do was engage a larger portion of the public in the healthcare debate, they couldn't have possibly written better legislation.

Be prepared for health care prices to go up 20% next year......

The only change I had was with my employer, P/T workers were eligible at 20 hours a week, now it's 30. A lot of stores have standing policy to limit P/T to under 30 hours. Thankfully my store isn't one. My $8/week, $2k deductible is safe.

there were two large things that needed fixed. pre-existing condition denial and lifetime caps. they effed up the entire system to fix those two things. as far as i'm concerned the whole thing could be repealed as long as they leave those two things alone. when i got my "oh crap" insurance a few years ago i had record of an ER visit for a sprained ankle. one of their stipulations of covering me was along the lines of "we're covering nothing below your left knee regardless if it has anything to do with your ankle or not" - that's the kind of BS that needed fixed. or my brother in law who hit the lifetime cap due to cancer and was going to have a couple million in bills fall on him even though he was paying insurance, the ACA fixed that.

Go Canada

I was always really curious how many Canadians had issues with their insurance. I've heard you can get supplemental insurance up there as well that allows you to say, come to the USA and get surgery if need be.

And also, how much negative impact does the single payer system in Canada have their economy?

In reply to the op, is there pre existing conditions they automatically add? I know my employers insurance 'assumed' you were a smoker unless you checked no and it added a $50/month fee.

Curmudgeon wrote: Those who peruse my drivel on a regular basis 1) really need some help and 2) will recall that I am not a fan of government interference in anything. I have recently come to the conclusion that not only was the ACA poorly conceived and poorly written, we as a nation are at the point where about the only thing that makes sense any more is a single payer system.

It wasn't poorly written or poorly conceived, they knew exactly what they were doing. That's why they didn't release it to the public before the vote, and why they used some administrative BS to force a vote before Congresspersons and their staffers would have time to go through all 600-something pages of it.

Yet another example of why, in nearly every case, more gov't power = bad.

Toyman01 wrote: In reply to Curmudgeon: Which is what they wanted you to decide when they wrote this screwed up travesty of legislation. If I was Obama, I'd call that a success.

I had that pegged long ago.

Datsun1500 wrote: In reply to patgizz: So it's ok to have no insurance, get sick, then buy it and expect them to cover it?

I think there's something about pre-existing conditions that you don't understand …