When I moved to Savannah, I was employed at Savannah Country Day School and obviously had insurance with that job.
I quit working fulltime in 2000. I started teaching part-time at Armstrong Atlantic State University, writing freelance columns and other pieces (mainly for the Savannah Morning News), and picking up some other jobs too (a story better left for another post).
I made very little money there for a few years, but it was an incredibly productive and healthy time of my life.
Of course, I didn’t have health insurance from any of those part-time jobs. Every six months or so, I’d price available plans, but even relatively inexpensive “catastrophic” plans made no financial sense for me. The deductibles and co-payments were just too high. If I got some sort of serious illness or were in a terrible accident, I’d go broke even with the insurance. And if I only had minor minor problems, I would be better off just paying out of pocket.
I never thought of myself as young and invincible — not at all. I’m just good at math, and insurance made no sense.
I’m pretty sure that lots of self-employed and -insured Americans have simply not done enough of the math and have been paying for years for plans that will land them in the poor house if they contract serious illnesses.
Fortunately, I didn’t end up spending any money on health care in those years beyond some occasional over-the-counter medications and sporadic trips for new glasses or contacts. (A sickly child, I have been really lucky as an adult. I haven’t been on a prescription drug since 1987 and have never had a cavity. Knock on wood.)
I guess it was in 2006 that I started working fulltime at Armstrong in a temporary capacity. That position came with insurance. I didn’t take advantage of that coverage at all, but at least I had the security of it. When my temporary position appeared to be ending a few years later, I looked at COBRA prices to continue my plan. The cost would have been over $500/month.
Fortunately, for me at least, Armstrong offered me another year as a fulltime temp and later I secured a permanent instructorship. So I’m still covered.
For what it’s worth, I think the U.S. should eventually move to a single-payer system, but the ACA is workable, if officials at various levels bought into it. Of course, they haven’t, and the fact that many states have refused to expand Medicaid has left millions with no prospect of coverage.
Non-cooperation can make any policy fail, and it’s simply true that the basic approach of the ACA has worked pretty well in Massachusetts and it has worked well so far in states like Kentucky that have expanded Medicaid and set up their own exchanges. See How we got Obamacare to work by Democratic governors Jay Inslee of Washington, Steve Beshear of Kentucky, and Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut.
I don’t mean to sound dismissive of the very real concerns and problems that Americans, including some of my friends, are facing with regard to changed and cancelled policies because of the ACA. Any system by which millions more Americans would be insured seems destined to be complex and create major upheaval.
But would we as a nation be better off with the pre-Obamacare status quo? I don’t think so.
I just hopped on healthcare.gov to see what I would qualify for if I did not have insurance through Armstrong and if I had the same income that I do right now. The process was a snap, seriously. It took about three minutes to discover that I would not qualify for a subsidy (income too high), and that the bronze plan would look like this:
That’s a pretty good plan.
And, no, it’s not cheap. Of course, if I were chronically ill and needed expensive treatments and meds, I could get a better plan with a lower out-of-pocket maximum and reduce the actual cost.
But that $278/month seems high anyway, huh? It does to me at least.
But I’m paying $180 per month right now as the employee contribution to my Armstrong plan — and Armstrong is paying over $400 a month on top of that.
If Armstrong would give me the option to get out of the group plan and give me that money directly, I’d sign up for an Obamacare bronze plan in a heartbeat.
And isn’t that what conservatives want — for people to quit depending on government for health care and buy their own plans on the open market? That’s what Paul Ryan wants to do with Medicare. (By the way, I find Ryan’s proposal ridiculous, since few sane seniors would forgo traditional Medicare to go out onto an exchange, but his plan relies heavily on the same type of private marketplace that was put in place under Obamacare.)
After choosing my hypothetical plan tonight (Dec. 1, the deadline for streamlining the ACA website), I was given three options for actually applying:
I’d be signing up right now if I didn’t have that darn government coverage.