It’s no secret to anyone who has followed my work over the past several years that I’ve typically fallen on the defense side of the Affordable Care Act. I read it. All of it. And that’s no easy feat. My guess is, some of the staunchest Obamacare haters haven’t read all of it.
I’ve defended the law because, in theory, it is a good law. Expanding health care to more people, that’s a good thing. Eliminating pre-existing condition provisions, great. Expanding access to preventive care, making health care premiums more fair for women — awesome, fantastic.
And the bottom line is, it is working. According to a RAND Corporation study last year, 17 million more Americans have gained health insurance since implementation of the ACA.
But there’s a reason that regardless of its effectiveness, more than half of those polled by Gallup periodically since the law’s implementation disapprove of the law. It’s a total pain in the a$$.
As an independent contractor, I do not have an employee-sponsored health plan and my husband, as a Ph.D. student, does not have access to discounts for spousal coverage. That means I am one of millions who can look to the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act to find affordable private coverage.
The process seemed easy enough. When I first investigated my options around Thanksgiving, I was able to navigate and research various plans and compare prices and coverage options. I spent an afternoon going through it all and made my selections. I saved them in my healthcare.gov account and left it to come back to when I could afford to pay the premium.
Queue this week as the deadline for open enrollment loomed. I logged into my account to find all of my selections were gone and only a fraction of the information I had previously provided still available.
This, I chalked up to simply just waiting too long. Perhaps information expires after a certain amount of time or health plans change from time to time. No biggie.
So I set to updating information. The page froze. I logged in again and started over. The page froze. I logged in again and started over. The page froze. I went back and forth through this process entering the same information six times before giving up.
Again, I chalked this up to bad timing. It was around 9:30 at night when other last minute enrollees may have been bogging down the site. So I planned to come back to it the next day during work hours when the site wasn’t likely to be as busy.
As expected, I was able to navigate the process quickly and easily. I selected my plans, both dental and health, and indicated I would use all of my subsidy toward the premium each month. I saved my progress and chose to wait until the next day, today, to finalize the enrollment process so I could also pay the premium at the same time.
And that brings us to the present. All of my information is still there. All of the steps are indicated as complete with just one step remaining — finalize the enrollment and pay for the plan.
Credit card in hand, the site now won’t let me click on the enroll button. I even updated information in each checked off category thinking maybe the site just needed a refresher. Nope.
Now I’m on hold — as I write. The estimated wait time was 20-minutes, it’s been 35, and I’m still on hold.
So why, as an Obamacare supporter, would I possibly want to share my frustration with a system that still has some kinks?
Here’s the deal, it’s not perfect. Not much is. Websites have problems, especially when they are overburdened. This process is a massive undertaking. Yeah, I’m pretty miffed about the inconvenience. I’m waiting on hold while I should be working. I’m writing this while I should be transcribing notes from an interview this morning. I’ll probably lose a bit of free time with my kids this evening playing catch-up as a result, and that really sucks.
But I didn’t have to wait until the last minute. And even if these problems had occurred if I hadn’t procrastinated, they still would have been ones I’d pretty much defend.
What needs to be remembered is, after this annoying process of navigating a website that could be a little better and waiting on hold for more time than I’d like, I’ll have health care that’s better than what I would have been able to afford before the Affordable Care Act.
In fact, before it, I went through several periods of my life without health coverage. I’ll be able to go to the dentist. I’ll be able to get preventive care. I’ll be able to go to an allergist to find out why I’m all of a sudden allergic to everything when I never have been before.
The bottom line is, I get the frustration. I really, really do. I just dropped the F-bomb to my husband while dealing with this crap at least 14 times. But what is important to remember is that the result is so worth it.
Thanks, Obama! (That last bit is a shout out to my kids who, anytime something goes wrong, shout “Thanks, Obama!” in as sarcastic a tone as they can muster.)
