We're a family of three. Health insurance for us is over $1,550 a month plus $250 annually for a dental discount program (my dentist accepts) for an individual policy offering junk insurance on the current individual market. Our eye care is out of pocket. The high price is due to our ages and preexisting conditions. My husband's company is too small, there's only 3 of them; so we've been on the individual market for a while. My work as an adjunct (yeah, that's a diary in itself) and part time risk management doesn't offer benefits. We've been looking forward to the exchanges for a while.
The new rates look pretty good over all for Florida. It took a while for me to decipher the Florida tables, but I'm pretty sure I've identified Broward County and our new premium for the Second Lowest Silver Plan would be $1,038 if we bought 3 individual policies. If we get the lowest Gold plan, our premium drops by 25% to $1,125. It would drop by nearly half if we went for the lowest Bronze plan. I'm not sure what will happen when we pool ourselves together into a single policy with a family deductible.
My husband's business partner is looking into the small business exchange to see if we want to take that route. (We'd be a group of less than 10 lives total.) He's telling us the rates are similar.
We're not the only ones checking out these exchanges. Apparently people on employer provided insurance plans are giving them a gander. I caught an interesting take on these rates at Forbes. David Whelan, a contributor who works as a hospital administrator. Hospital executives tend to be an interesting breed of conservatives. They may be Republicans for the most part, but they do have to fill the beds in their facilities with paying patients. That changes up the rhetoric. At first I thought it was a hit piece as it discussed both retailers, Home Depot and Trader Joe's decision to force part time workers onto the exchanges. Whelan's take is, in many ways, pretty standard for a conservative (except the part where Medicaid patients "deserve a safety net service):
So in a variety of ways, through new taxes and a loss of services, taxpayers are now paying not only for their own coverage but also for others to get almost-free health care. And I am not talking about the Medicaid program, whose recipients are deserving of a safety net service. These new recipients (“Trader Joe’s workers”) are part of a population who, until January 1, is not coming from the ranks of Medicaid or the uninsured. Rather, these individuals had most of their insurance bills covered by a company that is now pushing them through a loophole and onto the exchange.Whelan's a bit put out by this concept. So are a bunch of my friends who also compared their employer insurance rates with the exchange rates. (They will be in open enrollment too.) One friend, an IT manager, will be paying $1,600 a month for his employer provided insurance that includes eye care and dental, but covers at the Silver package rate for medical/eye care and 60% (Bronze-like) for dental. Another friend, a CPA, is looking at $1,200 rate for just her and her husband and will have to pay extra for eye and dental. I'm encouraged by both my friends' and Whelan's pique. Exchange rate envy will be a good thing; because if we're going to really fix the U.S. health care system, we've got to disconnect employment with health insurance. Whelan has a list of possible solutions that should give many progressives more encouragement. (He likes the last one best.)The way the law was written, and the way that the subsidies were designed, makes one group of people (taxpayers who have private non-exchange health insurance) pay twice for health coverage. Meanwhile others, and their employers, pay virtually nothing.
*Expand the employer mandate to cover part-time workers and apply it to all employers large or small.My solutions to Whelan's grievance would be different, but it's refreshing to see both his first and third solution. I've seen those are solutions floated around here. The second one (IMO) is standard conservative tilting at windmills fare.(snip, for fair use reasons)
*Somehow give a tax credit or an enhanced future Medicare benefit to those employers, families, and individuals who buy health insurance without subsidies, to compensate them for double-paying into the system.
(snip, for fair use reasons)
*Allow all employees to have the option to buy insurance on an exchange by declining at-work insurance and instead collecting the equivalent (tax-adjusted) employer-provided premium dollars to buy coverage.
What is most encouraging about this op-ed is that Whelan accepts the ACA, He expects it to go through. It's a done deal. There's no going back. That's impressive considering the other (cherry picking) Forbes articles about the ACA. My only caution is with what will happen to premium payments in 2015 & 2016 after the actuarial information comes through the pipeline.
No wonder the GOP is ready to do anything they can to stop the ACA from happening. It's going to work better than they said it would and too many people for their taste are going to like it.