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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSigning up for Obamacare: ‘It will save me over $6,000. For that, I would have waited all day.’
It took three hours, but Andrew Stryker managed to be among the first people to purchase health insurance through Obamacare's new insurance markets.
Stryker is 34 years old and lives in Los Angeles, where he now does freelance work. He pays a monthly premium around $600 to stay on the COBRA plan from a job he left four years ago. He has high blood pressure and says insurance companies have previously denied his applications for coverage on the individual market.
"I figured this might cut my premiums in half and I'd be getting better service for half the price," he says.
Stryker first logged into California's marketplace, Covered California, at midnight last night. He couldn't get the site to load, so he tried again around 8 a.m. today.
"It let me access the page and start signing up," Stryker says. It was not, as some have predicted, as simple as buying a plane ticket. "I would equate it to filling out a credit card application. The format was pretty clear. It wasn't too complicated."
The biggest problem, Stryker says, was that the Web site was slow. He would get through a step and then the screen would freeze. The whole process took three hours but, by the end, Stryker had a new health insurance plan.
"It's a silver level PPO," he says. "I did the research probably about a month ago, went through all the plans and compared them to my current one. I found one that I liked, so I signed up for that today."
Asked what he did to keep busy while signing up, Stryker says he was mostly watching television if the computer froze for a bit.
"Ive been watching the news about the government shutdown," he says. "Obviously three hours is a long time to wait, but it will save me over $6,000. For that, I would have waited all day."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/01/signing-up-for-obamacare-it-will-save-me-over-6000-for-that-i-would-have-waited-all-day/
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Hekate
(90,700 posts)Fan-tastic.
progressivebydesign
(19,458 posts)I'm paying over $200.00 a month for useless catastrophic coverage, that would bankrupt me anyway, if something bad happened.. but didn't offer enough to prevent anything from happening. It's all I can afford now. But I just went thru my State's exchange site, and found that my coverage will be (after federal help, $1.00 a month if I have co-pays. And $53.00 if I don't. The difference is groceries for me for a month... or gas to get to work. I'm blown away. If I'm making more money, of course it will go up, but STILL I would be paying nearly what I pay now, for REAL coverage. So I'd be saving over 2k a year, PLUS it's not even similar coverage. For the coverage I would get through the ACA, I would be paying 6k or more per year.
THIS is what the GOP doesn't want you to know.
Playinghardball
(11,665 posts)SDjack
(1,448 posts)to vote DEM in the elections. So, let's all do that.
tridim
(45,358 posts)We're going to rock 2014.