Tag: health insurance

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I have shifted (most of) my wallet contents into a new minimalist wallet.

After seriously considering the Ion minimalist wallet, I ended up going with the Travelambo minimalist wallet. It was one-sixth the cost—cheap enough that I figured I could try it as an experiment, even if I ended up not liking it.

Mainly, though, I went with it because it has a transparent window for an ID card on the outside of the wallet. I flash my i-card as a bus pass multiple times per week, and up to now I’ve had to open up my wallet every time to display the card.

I’m looking forward to not having to do that just to catch the bus.

ID-window side of new wallet

I think I like it. I’ve had to eject three of the cards I’d been carrying (AAA, AARP, FOID), but I haven’t needed to show any of them in a long time (and I have the AAA card on my phone if necessary). My library card and health insurance card are in the pocket behind my ID cards. My credit cards are in pockets on the other side:

Credit-card side of new wallet

So far it’s been pretty satisfactory. I’ll update if I end up being especially delighted or disappointed.

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My insurance company can’t quite get my healthcare.gov application processed in time to bill me before the end of the year. But the law only guarantees coverage if I make the first payment before the end of the year. So every year I have to track down the amount and scramble to make a payment despite not having a bill.

But now I have done so for next year. Phew.

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Below is the letter I just sent to my congressman.

I undoubted spent way more time drafting this letter than it was worth. I have no illusions that my congressman will read it and be swayed by my logic. As a practical matter, the best I can hope for is that someone on his staff will look at it carefully enough to add one tick to the column for “constituents opposed to repealing Obamacare.”

And yet, I think it was worth the effort I put into writing it—partially for my own benefit, as a way to clarify what I thought the most important points were, and partially for any local folks who might read it and be moved to weigh in with their own thoughts on the matter.

The Honorable Rodney Davis
1740 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Davis:

I am writing to urge you to preserve three key elements of the Affordable Care Act, which Speaker Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way” agenda does not protect: that policies cover the full range of essential care, that coverage be available at standard rates regardless of preexisting conditions, and that credits be available to help lower-income people buy health insurance.

With the Affordable Care Act’s rules, it’s possible to buy an insurance police and know that a full range of important care is covered. The “more choices” supported by Speaker Ryan’s plan would mean that people could “chose” to buy insurance with incomplete coverage. I have first-hand experience with how much work it is to analyze and compare insurance policies, trying to read between the lines to see what essential coverage is missing. The result of the Speaker’s plan would be many people who thought they were getting a good deal on their insurance would face bankruptcy because of hidden gaps.

With the Affordable Care Act, the last four years have been wonderfully free of the anxiety that any illness could turn into the “preexisting condition” that would make health insurance unavailable. Speaker Ryan’s plan to condition this on “continuous coverage” is a poor substitute. Sometimes people suffer a financial catastrophe and are temporarily unable to afford to maintain their insurance. It is terribly cruel to compound such a catastrophe with the additional penalty that health insurance—once they can afford it again—be unavailable or unaffordable.

My wife and I have modest incomes, and make some use of the credits available through the Affordable Care Act, which have made my insurance much more affordable. Speaker Ryan’s plan would eliminate these credits and replace them with a single credit which would probably be much smaller—and if as large, would be enormously generous to people with high incomes who scarcely need help affording their health insurance. The current means-tested credits seem much more likely to advance to goal of making health insurance available to everyone.

I urge you preserve these key elements of the Affordable Care Act.

Yours sincerely,

Philip M. Brewer

There are plenty of other things I might have included as well. For example, under the Affordable Care Act an older person can only be charged 3 times as much as a younger person for the same policy, whereas the Speaker’s plan would increase the multiple to 5x. If enacted, that change would cost me a lot. But I thought these were the most essential points: That insurance actually be insurance, that it be available, and that it be affordable.

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Congressman Rodney Davis has a questionnaire asking for constituent input on questions of the day.

I filled it out some weeks ago (in mid-December) and found some of the questions to be . . . . Well, here. This is what I sent to his office after I posted my questionnaire response:

Several of the questions on your recent survey were hard to answer, because an accurate answer might be taken as supporting a position that is the opposite from what I intend. These two in particular:

“Do you believe we need to shore up Medicare so it’s available to future generations?”

Of course I support preserving Medicare. However, I would  oppose any changes in the basic design of how Medicare makes healthcare available to seniors. In particular, I would strongly oppose turning it into some kind of voucher program.

My understanding is that, together with the cost savings provided by Obamacare, Medicare is very close to being fully funded. It seems quite possible that no changes are needed going forward. Depending on the details of health care costs and payrolls in the future, it may be that some additional funding will be required, but that is the question for the future.

“Do you believe Congress must provide proper oversight of the VA to ensure our veterans are receiving the care they deserve?”

Again, providing oversight is exactly what Congress should do. However, I would oppose giving the VA additional mandates—either in terms of the care they are to provide, or in terms of the reporting they are required to provide—unless those mandates are fully funded.

I have no sense that the VA is doing anything other than providing the best care they can with the resources provided. Congress’s deeper obligation, beyond oversight, is to provide the resources necessary to care for our veterans.

I expect to go on pestering Congressman Rodney Davis on a near-monthly basis for the next two years.

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I was one of the first people to try to sign up for insurance on healthcare.gov. That turns out to have been a mistake. At least, that’s my theory.

With considerable effort, over a period of a couple of days right at the beginning of October, I’d gotten through the first part (where you verify facts about yourself to confirm that you’re you). Then I’d done the part where they ask about your income, etc.

At that point—when I’d entered all the info about my and Jackie’s contact info, race, ethnicity, income, and so on—I clicked the last “submit” button. . . and waited.

After a long time, the submission timed out.

Not wanting to have to go through all that entering again, I just backed up a screen and clicked submit again. . . and waited again. And it timed out again.

I did that over and over again, hoping that eventually I’d get a successful submission. And at some point I did get one. In fact, I got a bunch—many of those failed submissions had apparently gone through before they failed. But (I now believe), something about them had gotten corrupted at some point.

On the first visit after that, I’d gotten through to the point of seeing what policies were available to me and how much they’d cost. I printed the list and reviewed it with Jackie and investigated the networks offered by a few plans and picked a policy (sticking with Health Alliance, but going for one of their new Silver plans). But when I returned, there was a glitch: I could no longer sign up for insurance for Jackie and myself; it offered me a policy only for myself, with no sign as to whether I’d be able to get Jackie signed up after.

Yesterday, I finally gave up on making my way through the signup process, and called the telephone interface.

Turns out, the people on the other end of the phone go through the exact same interface. So, of course, they ran into the exact same problem I did.

After escalating to the senior tech guys, the proposed solution was to reset my account and have me start over. (Something I would have done a long time before, if that interface were available.)

Sadly, I couldn’t make that work either.

Finally, I started over completely. I created a new account (with a new login name, using a new email address), re-verified my identity, and re-entered all the info about me. This time, having already selected a policy, I pressed straight ahead and enrolled.

So, I have successfully signed up for insurance through Obamacare. It took about an hour, once I started over from scratch. I suspect it would have worked pretty smoothly, if I hadn’t tried so persistently to sign up in those first few busy days.

Despite the aggravations of getting signed up, I’m pretty pleased. Obamacare is going to save me hundreds of dollars a month. Our insurance bill had been our largest bill—quite a bit higher than our rent. Now it will be just another monthly expense—bigger than our phone bill, but less than rent or groceries.

And yet, the cost savings is far from the most important thing. Before, I worried constantly that any major medical problem would ruin us—make it impossible to get affordable insurance; trap us in a policy that all the healthy people had fled, with premiums spirally inexorably higher until they consumed all our money. Now, at last, we have some security on that front. Cheap or expensive, at least our insurance is actually insurance. A major medical problem would still be a big deal—one of us would no longer be healthy. But at least it would just be that, and not that and a financial catastrophe too.