Welcome Anton,
Thank you for choosing Premera Blue Cross as your health plan.
The date you can begin using your benefits: June 1, 2014.
I received that message in an email 4 days ago, 133 days after I changed my plan through the Washington Health Benefits Exchange following a life event(new job) for which I was granted a special enrollment. It took over 4 months for the paperwork to get processed and sent to my insurance company.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am so thankful for the ACA and for the Washington Health Benefits Exchange and for the opportunity to change my plan when my life changed, but waiting for over 4 months for the plan to get processed and sent to my insurance company is the definition of bureaucratic incompetence and with all due appreciation, I have to say that we have to do better than that.
I voted for President Obama in 2008 with the confidence that he would be a competent president and the hope that he would actually manage to make some progress solving some of our big problems, such as our health care system. When he started working with congress on the ACA, I could not have been happier.
I held my breath as the ACA worked it's way through congress to finally be signed into law. And I kept holding my breath through the 2010 midterms and the 2012 election, as the GOP ran on repeal of the ACA. And I kept holding my breath until the moment I read earlier this year that I had health insurance through the ACA. That is when I finally exhaled and relaxed. No more pre-existing conditions. No more yearly or lifetime caps. It wasn't perfect, but it was a leap forward and it covered the most important things. I actually thanked god for the ACA. I did.
So, it is with great love that I offer this constructively criticism of the ACA, or specifically, the WA implementation. Which, for the record, is fantastic is so many ways. But it needs to be better. 4 months of anxiety wondering when I will have insurance again. 4 months of having to hold off doctors I visited before I knew what was happening and asking them to wait to get paid. And eventually, these last 2 months putting off going to the doctor until I have insurance. The ACA is supposed to exist so that people don't go through things like this.
I know that progress has it's bumps in the road. But having only started taking medicine for high blood pressure a year ago, it's truly scary bumps when I had to put off going to the doctor for the check up she kept asking me for this summer. And my wife held off going to the doctor for a issue that her doctor is having her do an ultra sound next week to figure out.
Now, would I go back to before the ACA? Not a chance. Years ago our health insurance company refused to pay for my wife's care and they cited her having once missed a period (which they only knew about because she went to the doctor to see if she was pregnant) as a pre-existing condition. The ONLY debt that we have accrued in the 14 years that we have been married (other than car payments and student loans) is those medical bills the insurance refused to pay. We're still paying them off. Without the ACA, our insurance wouldn't cover my wife getting this ultra sound. They would just let us go bankrupt and if it got bad enough, let her die, because they don't care about us.
I spent the last 4 days thinking about whether or not to write this diary. It's the mid terms and I don't want my criticism to get stumbled upon and used to attack the ACA. But I decided that I can't let shameless political opportunists silence my voice and I have a responsibility as a Democrat to speak up when I can see that there needs to be some improvements to the work we are doing.
So, again, I say with love, that we need to do a better job with the ACA. People need affordable health insurance that they can count on. That's what was promised and that's what should be delivered.
6:14 PM PT: I should add that I am 2 months ahead on my insurance payments, because the plan is over $300 less than what I paid a year ago, before the ACA, for basically the same plan. The savings made it easy to pay ahead. And I can take the rest of my savings and put it into an HSA, which is just awesome!