President Obama deserves a big round of applause for the Patient Protection portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). However, I predict that including “Affordable Care Act” in the name will go down as one of the biggest marketing blunders of the century. This post compares the affordability of Obamacare to what my family had before the new law. Affordable is not a term that properly describes the Affordable Care Act.
Affordable Care Act – April Fools
Based on a change of status, my family needed to find new health insurance. That made us an early adopter, guinea pig to some, of Obamacare. After shopping and comparing the alternatives, here are the costs of changing to Obamacare:
To keep our doctors and hospitals, which requires going off the exchange to buy insurance, the scenario is as follows:
- Whether we use no healthcare, or a lot of healthcare, Obamacare costs 42% ($8,868) more than our earlier plan.
If we accept the fate of losing access to 40% of the area hospitals and 20% of our family doctors (an untenable alternative), we can reduce the increase in costs by buying insurance on the healthcare.gov exchange. What happened to saving $2,500 per family, per year? The bullets below show how much the costs went up, for inferior service:
- Using no healthcare for the entire year, the cost is exactly equal between the two plans.
- Using $3,500 of healthcare for the year, Obamacare costs 10% ($2,027) more
- Using $7,000 of healthcare for the year, Obamacare costs 26% ($5,527) more
This analysis is based on like comparisons of a small group policy with a Gold level plan under Obamacare. All comparisons assume we only use in network doctors and hospitals. As stated in the post titled : Obamacare, Available Care Act, It’s Not! on March 24, losing access to hospitals and doctors is unacceptable.
Read on so you can say you read it first here. “Out of network” costs will become a major problem under Obamacare. Insurance companies will use a variety of services (labs, diagnostics, etc.) that are out of network and pass those “out of network” charges on to policyholders. That will raise the cost of Obamacare even further, and will be nearly impossible for policyholders to combat.
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