Another perspective..."Affordable" Care Act

[cilla4progress]

I am training to be a volunteer In-Person Assister under the Act. I wanted to volunteer in order to advocate implementation - because I truly believe/d it to be a step in the right direction.

Imagine my shock when I learned that my health insurance premiums will likely DOUBLE under ACA! Costs are still being finalized, but using my state's Exchange website, it states that our premiums will double.

This, on top of my just being laid off from my job last month! The cost is based on our new decreased income.

Perhaps our situation is unique: my husband has excellent low cost health insurance through his government employer. Rather than covering my daughter and me at a very high price, I found state-funded insurance available to anyone regardless of income which I purchased over the past 3 years. It's going away under ACA. It was a "gold" policy - 80/20.

Shucks.

[stuckinodi]

1. My Understanding

If you can get coverage through a spouse's work, subsidies don't apply. I could be very wrong about that.

[cilla4progress]

2. I believe you are correct.

So long as it is "affordable" per a formula. It will cost him $1000 / mo. to cover my daughter and me!

[mackdaddy]

3. ACA will alow me to get Health insurance finally.

According to the www.healthcare.gov, and the calculator on the Kaiser Family Foundation calculator http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/ I will be able to even buy insurance for the first time in nearly two years.

I have a "pre existing condition" of being 56 and use a CPAP machine at night and no one would even sell me insurance. The high risk insurance is even more than I make being self employed. It was either make house payments or make insurance payments.

The basic silver package is estimated at about 750 a month, and with my recent sales my income will be such that I will get about a $500 per month subsidy. $250 a month is doable as long a I can nurse my 18 year old Toyota pickup a bit longer. This is still equivalent to a car payment though.

Looks like if I make over about 40k per year the subsidy goes away entirely. I am assuming this is where you are at for your family. I think that the insurance companies are really celebrating on all of this. I can not see how auto insurance is $1000 a year and health insurance is ten times that.

If they had pro-rated the insurance payment by employers based on percentage of a 40 hour week instead of this 30 hour cutoff nonsense we could have avoided a lot of the backlash. I think if there had been incentives for employers to cover families it would have taken care of another big area.

The ultimate would still be a medicare for all buy-in to keep the prices honest.

Hope it works out for coverage for you and your daughter.