Whenever someone talks about wanting to disband the ACA (which some call ObamaCare), it sets my teeth on edge.
Like many other Americans, if it wasn’t for the ACA, I am literally uninsurable unless I go through my own corporation because of pre-existing conditions. Getting insured this way unfairly increases my costs, and frankly this isn’t an option for many other potentially uninsurable Americans out there. The ACA means that I do not have to jump through that hoop.
The details:
I am self-employed and make a comfortable income. For years I was putting in enough hours with an agency that I was able to get insurance from them as an employee, but when I left that gig I was in trouble…
I have degenerative disc disease. By the time I was in my 40s I had occasional issues with my back, and by the time I was in my mid-40s I was in constant pain. It impacted my life greatly, but I was able to deal with it. I knew that eventually I needed to start the treatment process: first physical therapy, then eventually on to surgery, but it was unthinkable without health insurance.
What I learned after I lost the insurance from the agency gig was that because of my back, I was not able to get insurance except through an employer. This is the case even though, other than my back, I’m extremely healthy: cholesterol, blood sugar, weight—everything perfectly normal/healthy.
To be clear: I was not insurable at all. I could not find insurance, even with a high premium and very high deductible, not even a plan that excluded my back. I couldn’t even find “catastrophic” insurance to cover me in case I had a heart attack or a serious accident. Nothing. I could get insurance from an employer, but not as an individual.
Now, when I say I am “self employed,” I do not mean a few freelance gigs here and there. I mean year-round, full-time (sometimes 60+ hours per week) work at a very detailed at-home job for a changing palette of 5-9 clients. It’s my work and I love it. I shouldn’t have to give up my own business and get a job as an employee for someone else and probably earn less money just so I can get health insurance.
My workaround
My company is an LLC—a limited-liability corporation. As a small business, listing myself and my husband as the two employees of the corporation (which is accurate), I was able to get insurance for me and my husband for about $1200/month. [This amount of course grey every year.]
Because we had to be listed as two separate employees, we could not get any family discounts: we were two individuals with two separate plans. This “two individual plans” thing means that my family paid twice the deductible that people with “family” plans paid. Also, this plan didn’t include either of the doctors my husband and I had been seeing for years, nor the dentist who we preferred. But it was the best we could do and the only way I could be insured.
The plus side is that just when my back problem got to its worst, I was finally insured and was able to take care of it.
Enter the Affordable Care Act.
In September of 2013 my insurance was cancelled. I know everyone was up in arms when the cancellations came in, but I didn’t care. You see, while I had the idea that I’d probably be able to find something cheaper on the new exchanges, since my current insurance company had paid for my expensive back surgery about 16 months before, I figured I should be a considerate policy-holder and stick with them for a while. But when they sent me that cancellation notice, I decided I was released from that moral obligation.
So, because the ACA says that insurance companies can no longer exclude people with pre-existing conditions, we found a huge array of insurance options. My new insurance:
- Covers the two doctors and the dentist we like.
- Has the same deductible we had before, but we are now considered a 2-person family instead of two individuals, so our total deductible is half what it was.
- Costs about $500 LESS than I was paying before.
So, that’s why I love the ACA.
Yes, it has had a rocky launch, but honestly, if there hadn’t been extreme roadblocks thrown into its path every day by those who oppose it, who’s to say the roll-out wouldn’t have been much better? It doesn’t have everything we ultimately need, but it is an excellent, assured first step toward a better health care system for everybody.