Health Care Coverage attained, most likely

[ritaxis]

I have signed up for Covered California. I will be paying a dollar a month, and for that I get to keep my present doctor: I will have $15 copay for regular doctor visits, and I forget what all, but it was all very cheap. I'm mostly relieved to have it done. The website was not all that overwhelmed by the time I got to it, which is why I waited a week, but it's a little stupid. Not horribly stupid, though. As web things go, it wasn't bnearly as stupid as it could be.

On a related front, at the block party last week I met a couple of dental hygeine students and got their card because they need patients and my teeth need cleaning.

and now to bed: I still ahve jury duty in the monring.

Comments

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

That's good news.

Yesterday's Washington Post had an article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/california-aggressively-pushes-health-care-law/2013/10/07/7da2dc0a-2cbf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html) in the business section about California's efforts to implement the ACA.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Wow! That is really inexpensive. Is this just the way California does things? I've heard the state exchanges are superior in all ways to the federal exchange, which is all that is available in the states that have refused to institute the ACA for themselves.

Do you have any other medical coverage?

Love, c.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

There were almost a dozen plans available at my age and income and (lack of) other coverage. So the actual plans were between 600 and 800 dollars a month (and a few which were more), and then there are (state?) subsidies on that, and in several cases that amounted to basically covering the whole plan. The amount of subsidy ranged a lot more than the original cost, resulting in my final cost ranging quite a lot too.

I don't know how it works out for young people or for people making more than 20 thousand a year. We'll see.

See, the thing is that in California this has been brewing for a long time. There has been a strong movement for single-payer health care, and several times it uhas come up in initiative form (where it has been narrowly? defeated with the influx of a lot of corporate money) and in the legislature, where it made it through to a governor's veto at least once. So it's not surprising that the California system would turn out to be one of the better ones.

A year and a half ago there were loud annoucnements on the part of several big insurance companies that they were pulling ut of the Calfiornia individual insuranmce market because they could see what was in the works. But 1)the companies that made these announcements weren't big in individual insurance anyway at the time, doing most of their business with corporate, and 2) I see at least one of those names in the list of companies providing insurance in the exchange today.

The explanation for the latter that I saw was that the companies did the math and figured out that even with the lower profit margins, the vastly increased pools made for a better total profit after all. Something you'd have thought they'd have twigged to in the past, but maybe they didn't think they'd get the market without the individual mandate.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time to describe and explain these things!

Love, C.