Why we love the Affordable Care Act

[patoadam]

We love the Affordable Care Act. Thanks to Obamacare, we will spend $21,621.60 less for health insurance this year, and we have vastly better coverage.

Here are the boring but important details. In 2013, we spent $36,023.40 in health insurance premiums for our family of three. This year, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, we will spend $14,401.80, and we could have spent less. We did not choose the least expensive insurance available through the Affordable Care Act, and we are not eligible for a government subsidy.

Why were our insurance premiums so high in 2013? We were trapped in our expensive health insurance plan because my wife is a cancer survivor and I am self-employed. As premiums rose from year to year, anyone who was healthy enough to qualify for less expensive insurance did. The pool of insured people got sicker and sicker, so premiums rose higher and higher.

In 2013, our per-person out-of-pocket maximum was $25,000. This year, it is $6,350. In 2013, we paid more than $25,000 in medical expenses that were not covered by insurance. So far this year, we have paid $295. Our total savings for all of 2014 thanks to lower premiums and better coverage could easily hit $40,000.

We are telling the world more than we really want to about our finances because we think it is important to counteract the misleading stories of people who say they had to pay more for insurance because of the Affordable Care Act. Did you hear the one about Bette from Spokane, who said she had to pay $700 a month more for health insurance? She didn’t get her new insurance from the healthcare.gov website; she went back to her old insurer and switched to the most expensive plan they had available.

The bottom line is that nobody who is eligible for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act will have to pay more than 9.5% of his or her income for insurance, and most people will pay much less. As I type this, there is still time to apply.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Since Jan 1, I've been insured for the first time in a decade. I do get a subsidy, so I pay 80-some bucks a month. I just paid a $30 copay for a routine doctor's visit that would otherwise cost about $180. And, well, I could trip and break a bone without going bankrupt.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

That's another reason I'm signed up even though it doesn't help me much. The subsidy money goes to Kaiser, a non profit, which makes it tax money that's going for health care for other people and not for murdering strangers overseas.