This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

I'm Glad I Have Obamacare

If you like your health insurance, you can keep it ... unless you can't afford it.

Up until recently, I had employer-provided health insurance.  Then a job loss hit our household.  The remaining job pays okay, but it doesn't offer health insurance.

I liked that insurance.  I wanted to keep it.

But at $1200/mo. full premium price with no employer support and an income stream gone (for now), my wife and I couldn't afford it.  So we lost that insurance.  Too bad.  We had to let it go.

But great news: The Obamacare website was up and running, and running pretty well.  My wife and I logged in and examined all our options there to make a pick.  We can afford a silver plan.

The website wasn't bad.  We logged in during a slower period, the end of February, and the actual mechanical part of filling out all the information fields and going through the stages took maybe about an hour.  Discussing and deciding which way we wanted to go probably took another hour.  No real problems for us.  Biff, bam, boom and we were done.  The check is in the mail.

The silver plan has a moderate premium at $400/mo.  The deductible is high, about $7,000.  The copays are also high: $40 for primary care office visits.  It's not my idea of the best insurance policy.

But it's much, much better than what we'd have without Obamacare, which probably would have been nothing at all.  No lie.  I've gone without health insurance for years at a time in the past because I couldn't afford it.  Luckily, my brain tumor was diagnosed during a brief period when I was covered.  Imagine ... No, don't.  It's too awful.

"If you like your health insurance, you can keep it" ... unless you lose your job and can't afford it anymore, which can happen to almost any of us.  That's when Obamacare comes to the rescue.

Obamacare is helping my wife and me right now.  Our lives are more secure for it.

True story.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?