My Wife's Losing Her Obamacare Coverage Because The Insurer Lost $400 Million
http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillm...t-400-million/
If you ask President Obama how Obamacare is going, he will say awesome, couldn’t be better. But how about asking 367,000 Texans who are having their health insurance coverage eliminated because the insurer lost $400 million on that group in 2014.
It’s not like the health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, wasn’t charging enough—at least from the insureds’ standpoint.
Last fall, the company informed us, along with thousands of other Texans, that it would be canceling my wife’s individual policy—i.e., a policy she buys personally.
So we began looking over the options. While her 2014 premiums weren’t cheap, they didn’t seem unreasonable for a policy with a $2,500 deductible. We were generally very happy with her coverage, but we were told that policy would end Dec. 31, 2014, and she needed to enroll in an Obamacare-qualified plan.
Our insurance agent, having done several comparisons, suggested that most of her clients with Blue Cross policies would likely be best off remaining with that company. But, she warned, most would be paying more.
She wasn’t kidding.
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Make no mistake. The new health law has disrupted coverage for millions, and driven up costs for millions more.
If my wife chose a similar plan with the same $2,500 deductible, her premiums would more than double.
There were other options, like one with a $5,000 deductible for about $25 more a month. But most of those plans had very “narrow networks”—i.e., a much more limited group of in-network doctors and hospitals—in order to keep the premiums from rising even higher. My wife’s doctor wasn’t taking any of those plans.
So she eventually chose a 2015 plan almost identical to the 2014 plan she had with the same insurer—except the deductible went up from $2,500 to $6,000.
Oh, and it cost 50% more for that policy. And that was her best option.