Covered California up and running
by digby
A tale from the Obamacare LA trenches:
It took three hours, but Andrew Stryker managed to be among the first people to purchase health insurance through Obamacare’s new insurance markets.
Stryker is 34 years old and lives in Los Angeles, where he now does freelance work. He pays a monthly premium around $600 to stay on the COBRA plan from a job he left four years ago. He has high blood pressure and says insurance companies have previously denied his applications for coverage on the individual market.
“I figured this might cut my premiums in half and I’d be getting better service for half the price,” he says.
Stryker first logged into California’s marketplace, Covered California, at midnight last night. He couldn’t get the site to load, so he tried again around 8 a.m. today.
“It let me access the page and start signing up,” Stryker says. It was not, as some have predicted, as simple as buying a plane ticket. “I would equate it to filling out a credit card application. The format was pretty clear. It wasn’t too complicated.”
[…]
“It’s a silver level PPO,” he says. “I did the research probably about a month ago, went through all the plans and compared them to my current one. I found one that I liked, so I signed up for that today.”
See? People who are already in the private health insurance market are pretty savvy about all this because we’ve been forced to deal with insurance company hell for quite some time. Signing up for us isn’t that big of a deal. I figured I’d wait a day or two before jumping in. I’d imagine a lot of other people are doing that as well. The people the government needs to reach are the currently uninsured who haven’t jumped through these hoops before.
It must be remembered, however, that this isn’t going to be a big improvement for everyone. Some people make too much money for subsidies and their premiums are going to go up. A lot. I know the screams from the Westside of LA are going to be deafening. But for the struggling middle class folks like us who’ve been priced out of good insurance and are basically stuck with an expensive catastrophic plan at a time in our lives when we really need something better, this is going to be an improvement. A substantial one.
Update: An acquaintance of mine in another state who is working for the exchange tells me that people with pre-existing conditions were calling in droves today.
Of course they are. These poor people are desperate to get get some insurance and any society that would just let them hang out there in the wind is barbaric. If nothing else works in Obamacare, the fact that people who are already sick (or just have some kind of diagnosis) will be able to access affordable health care makes it a success.
What a relief it must be for these folks to be covered. I sure hope that not even one of them or any member of their family will ever vote for Republicans again. They literally wanted them to just … well … die.
*She also says that people are really shocked to find out that these plans are high quality because of the 10 essential benefits, especially the chronic disease management and no monetary caps. People who’ve been round the private insurance block know exactly what a godsend that is.
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