We had health care sign-up yesterday at work. Here's how it went.

We have fewer than 50 employees where I work, so my employer is not obligated to provide health care and isn’t going to, though he does pay for dental, vision and a $25K life insurance policy for all employees. But he did ask his broker to come in and spend time with each person to discuss what options they have and help them get signed up and what have you.

So I got enrolled. My plan is the bronze plan, which is better than what I had and it is going to cost me $60.00 less a month. I’m pretty happy with it overall.

One guy with health issues who makes just over $50 a year is keeping the plan he’s always had. He pays over $700.00 a month. Ouch.

Almost everyone else is at or a little above minimum wage. Only two of the ten signed up. On average, the premium was about $70.00 a month for them and most could not afford even that small amount. Peggy makes $9.00 an hour and has two children. I don’t know how she survives as it is, so I totally get that $70.00 more a month in expenses could really hurt.

I do hope we aren’t typical, because if so, I don’t think this bodes well for the ACA. And I tried pretty hard to sell this to everyone. I want this to work badly. Or something even better, really, but anyway, I’m concerned.

I’ll assume you meant $50K. 700/month on that other salary is seriously steep! :stuck_out_tongue:

Probably half of people at my full-time job make less than $10/hr. We have health care through our employer who pays 80% of our premium. If mine’s typical, I pay $36.61 every two weeks (single, female, no kids, non-smoker, no conditions). Any employee working over 20 hours is allowed to enroll, but I guess they can still opt out and do the Universal enrollment if it’s a few bucks cheaper? I haven’t paid much attention aside from what gets plastered across the news.

I agree with the OP, based on what I’ve heard so far, the premiums sound like more than many who make under $10/hr can afford, especially if they haven’t already built the expense into their budget. Personally, I never understood that and even when I did make similar wages I didn’t consider health care an option when it was available, just worked around it like I would an electricity bill or rent. Easier, in a way, since it’s a pre-tax payroll deduction it’s not like I ever really saw the money first. Couldn’t mis-spend it.

If ‘Peggy’ is making $9/hour and has two kids and a single-earner family, how is she not eligible for medicaid? Even working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, she’s only making $18,720, less than the federal poverty level of $19,530 for a family of three. If I were her, I wouldn’t sign up either, since I’d be getting free healthcare from the government.

:smack:oops, yes of course.

The way I understood it was her children are covered under medicare, but she is not.
So I gather that the $70.00 is for her.

Nitpick: Medicare is for old people, Medicaid is for poor folk. I have health insurance through my employer so I just had to renew the options. As the Right Wingers predicted, my premiums have indeed skyrocketed. That extra $30/month is taking a serious bite out of my beer budget.

I suppose I’m just an aging socialist fool, but if there were a way I could anonymously identify a Peggy in my neighborhood, I’m sure I could scratch another $70 out of my monthly budget.

I’m guessing her problem is that she is below the poverty level in a state that didn’t expand medicaid. She’d qualify for medicaid in a state that chose to expand it, but as it is, she doesn’t get an insurance subsidy because she is below poverty level. It wasn’t SUPPOSED to work that way, but that is how it ended up working. And I’m not sure that you can blame Obamacare for “our state chose not to expand medicaid and the court said we didn’t have to.”

We’re having open enrollment next week. Overall, I’m not a happy camper. Currently, I have an excellent healthcare plan with no deductable. That is not an option next year. All three options will come with a deductable, and generally worse coverage than I have now. The low-deductable option costs more than I pay now for a better plan. There’s also a mid-range option that costs less than what I pay now, and a high-deductable option that’s pretty cheap, but basically doesn’t cover anything until you hit a $5000 deductable. The high-deductable option is offered now, and costs the employee nothing.

I’m going with the mid-range option. If I’m going to have to accept lower coverage, I can at least get a price break for it. I didn’t care for the high-deductable option when it was free, and it’s certainly not looking any better now that I’d have to pay for it.

Have you run the numbers on the high-deductible plan? I did, and between the lower premiums and the tax deduction, it actually turned out to be quite a bit cheaper for us to go with that over an 80/20 plan. It’s a little counter-intuitive when you see that big deductible, and over course it depends on the plan itself and how much you use healthcare, but I know I’m not the only person who has figured out that it’s the way to go.

Other than that, for my employer, there’s no increase this year. They communicated to us that the cost is actually going up 7%, but they are covering that and not passing it on to the employees.

Wouldn’t many of those low-income employees be entitled to subsides under the ACA? Did that $70/month cost reflect the subsidy?

We just finished open enrollment. We’re about 800 strong here, give or take a few. We’re sticking with the existing health plans, but they have been “upgraded” to make them ACA-compliant. Premiums went up ~40% across the board. Max out of pocket went up a fair bit, and deductables are up as well.

We’re not exactly thrilled.

I think you can blame it a little bit. If the law weren’t so complex, if Congress hadn’t ended up passing a draft bill before the Democrats lost filibuster-proof senate, if it hadn’t been so contentious in the first place, there might have been time for someone to look for corner cases like this and fix them: “Hey, it says here that we’re unilaterally expanding a state program. Some of those states are controlled by Republicans, who have vowed to stop this law. What happens if they disagree? Are we going to pass a court challenge?” “Well, let’s haul out Article I and take a look-see.” (Practically Sorkinesque!)

Regardless of how much you like or dislike Obamacare, or how much you think the Republican position is reasonable or unreasonable, it seems clear that the strategy of passing a not-totally-polished bill that requires many interworking parts on a party line vote and sort of hoping that everyone, including all the people who opposed it, would chip in to fix it once it got passed was rather short-sighted.

The legal challenges to the ACA could have gone a lot of different ways, but even in retrospect, the justification for the SCOTUS decision seems to have been invented out of whole cloth. You can’t defend against every random thought that passes through a Chief Justice’s brain.

ETA: and it was only ‘contentious’ because the GOP decided they weren’t going to cooperate with a bill designed to accomodate them. Lord knows Obama tried - he let the ‘Gang of Six’ dither through the summer and fall of 2009 in the hopes that maybe one of the Republicans in that Gang would have said, “if you put X in the bill, I’ll support it.” But you can’t please people who don’t want to be pleased. Hell, even Susan Collins, who voted for the bill in committee, turned around and voted against it on the floor.

Oh, bullshit. The choices were to pass a not-totally-polished bill, or pass nothing. The complexity of the bill was in order to have near-universal health coverage that didn’t kill the health insurance companies - and any bill that did that would have been dead before arrival.

Most of the younger people I ask are going to take the penalty.

That bill was not “not-totally-polished.” It was, for the large part, unread.

Why didn’t we just ask other countries how they did it and adopt their program?

You guys studied what other countries do and decided it wouldn’t work for you. It would have essentially put your entire health insurance industry out of work.

If I understand the rulz right (which would be impressive in itself, the rulz being so complex and incomprehensible), the subsidy is available only for people earning 100% to 400% of the poverty level.

That’s right. People earning less than 100% of poverty level, who would be most needing of the subsidy, don’t get the subsidy. Rather, if I read this right, these people are exempt from “The Mandate” that they be insured. Go figure.

Amirite? Anybody?

If making your plans ACA-compliant increased premiums by 40%, I shudder to think how little coverage your plans used to offer. Most individual plans that are going up by a lot either a) offered very little actual coverage and/or b) were only available to very healthy individuals. Given that you seem to be in a group-coverage setting, I imagine that (b) doesn’t really apply.

Good lord! NO deductible? Consider yourself lucky.

One thing about those high deductible plans is a lot of companies offer a HSA (Health savings account.) Which basically works just like a 401k. Except that you can withdraw from it at any time to spend on medical expenses.

And what’s great about it with my company, every year my employer will drop 1700 into the account. Yay free money!

That’s because people earning less than 133% of the poverty line are supposed to be eligible for Medicaid, and shouldn’t be needing to buy health insurance at all. The only reason that’s not happening is that a bunch of Republican governors and legislatures decided that they’d rather stick it to millions of people in their states than take money from the federal government to expand Medicaid.