I know that Obamacare has a bad name amongst many of you. The recent election was in essence a referendum on it and President Obama, and it was hated. Conservative talk shows and Fox News regularly campaigns against it, and the coming Republican majority of congress has pledged to end it. Court cases may soon mean that all that I'm going to write about goes away. But listen to my story before you decide to keep hating.
My wife and I both work jobs in which our employers are unable and unwilling to provide health insurance. That's fine...having health care through an employer makes you more attached to those employers than you should be; you face great uncertainties about changing jobs because you don't want to have to change your insurance. But for us, this freedom to move has meant we needed to buy health insurance ourselves. When we got married a decade ago, we paid what I already thought was a high amount for insurance and we have kept it for a decade. It has been pretty good insurance, paying most of the bills when she had her appendix out while out of state and when we had our two children. But yearly the rates went up, usually 12-15% per year on average. Over the course of a decade the premium to cover us (and eventually our two children) tripled. It's not like we were sick much, either...just yearly shots for the kids and a yearly visit to the allergist for our son. Maybe a few other appointments, but our rates showed us paying much more in than we were getting out of the insurance. A few times we looked into other plans, but most anything comparable cost even more than we were already paying...so we stayed where we were.
Then Obamacare went into effect. And for the first time the rates stopped skyrocketing...I think that last year our premium only went up 3%. We were hoping that maybe with competition the 'affordable' part of the Affordable Care Act really meant something. But a few weeks ago we got our renewable notice for 2015, and once again the rates went way up: 13%. We were now going to be paying more per month for health insurance for a healthy family than the combined cost for our mortgage, homeowners insurance, a car payment, and car insurance for both cars. Something was definitely wrong.
So we decided to use the health care marketplace on healthcare.gov when open enrollment began today. Could we find something better? Hopefully. I started shopping and now had almost too many choices, 32 different plans from 4 different providers. Some of them were rather cheap, but had lots of out-of-pocket expenses. Others were expensive (in other words, basically what we were going to pay now), but paid for almost everything (which was not the case with what we had).
I will confess that the signup was not the easiest in the world...it took me almost half an hour to get to the actual health plans after telling them most of my life story. I think I had to indicate that I was a white male non-Latino a half-dozen times. But eventually I got there, and all the information about the details of the plan were stated rather clearly. Again, there were almost too many choices, but we settled on something in the middle of the pack...a decent deductible, a decent maximum out-of-pocket, and decent co-pays. We also added on a separate dental plan. All in all, the plan is very comparable to what we had previously as far as costs we will incur through the year.
So, what't the damage? Compared to what we paid this year, 27% less for both plans. Compared to what we were going to pay for next year, almost 35% less. And this doesn't factor in the $1600 in tax credits it says that we will receive for 2015. (To be honest, I'm not sure whether that's $1600 for each of us or just $1600 for all of us. I think it's all of us, but hey, that still ain't bad.) The total amount we will save even with the smaller number comes to over $6800 for our family.
Now, Obamacare may be distasteful for you because of your ideology...should the government be involved with this at all? I know...keep your government hands off my medicare, you are saying. But health care companies, like most large companies, have generally shown that they can't be trusted to do the right thing on their own. When forced into something, they're not going to be able to bleed us as much as they were doing before. Yes, maybe I could have found all these things on my own rather than through a government website. But a one-stop shopping area for health insurance that meets certain standards and can't free-market itself into cheating me? Fine by me.
Or maybe you hate Obamacare because you don't like that it's changing your own insurance. You are working for a company that is being forced to change their own policies (or even end their policies) because of skyrocketing health care costs. But let me ask you this...is it Obamacare doing this? Or is it the last vestiges of a dying employer-based health care system grabbing whatever it can before collapses in on itself? What's really the really the problem? Maybe it's just that your company sucks, and is run by somebody upset because he won't be able to afford a third vacation home. You figure that out.
Maybe there are other, genuine reasons to hate Obamacare. There are other affects of this that will not be known for awhile. The bureaucracy of healthcare is only increasing, and that's distasteful to me. I don't really want to go through the government to get health care, and given other government involvement (hello, VA!) with the health care system, I'm still a bit wary. Likely direct control of the health care system is not good. I've been wondering if maybe a single-payer option is good, and let the government run the whole thing. Probably not. Quality will suffer and innovation will dry up if that's the case.
Of course I don't know what the future holds with this. There's a real possibility that it turns into a disaster. If it tries screwing over me or my family, I'll come back and say that it did so, and find something else and join you in your hatred. Who knows, maybe this plan will also go up 13% each year and in a few years I'll be back where I started.
For now, though, I'm looking forward to taking that $6800 that I will be saving in 2015 and doing something productive with it. Maybe I'll demand-side boost other parts of the economy. Maybe I'll add some extra funds to my kids' college fund or to my IRA. Maybe I'll give more generously to some charities. Hopefully I won't have to pay more taxes to support the evil government. But one thing I do know is that a lot more of my family's money will not be going into the pockets of health insurance companies in 2015. And that surely is a good thing, right?
