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March 31, 2014 at 02:00 PM
So, you’re a smart, educated person who’s sophisticated enough to be reading health insurance news (and blogs).
You somehow lost access to rich old health insurance with easy access to a huge network of great health care providers, and you’re trapped in Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)-compliant plan heck.
If you are still stranded in application limbo, and can’t even get a valid insurance card because of computer problems: OK, that’s a genuine problem.
But, if you have a working card, and your individual “qualified health plan” (QHP) works about as “well” as promised, and the problem is that you have a network of 10 overworked barber-surgeons who have to trim 10 guys’ mustaches before they can start on your gallbladder: Your QHP is working.
President Obama looked at everyone and said, calmly, sweetly, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”
In the fine print, if anyone had recited the fine print, the fine print TV commercial narrator whose voice you can never really make out would have murmured, “But, if you change plans, and you have decent health and money, we’re going to give you skin in the game on steroids. And amphetamines. And ramjets. Till you are miserable.”
On the one hand, one point of PPACA is to give poor people and sick people — the helpless people who really need health care and have no ability to influence anything, at this point — pretty good Medicaid coverage at a price they can probably afford, or that is saving their life to such an extent that they will scrape up the money to pay for the coverage, because, really, what other choice is there, other than to just roll over and die.
