My husband retired almost two years ago. We were fortunate that for the first year, we were covered under the company policy but then had to go on Cobra for the next year. He has a pre existing condition that can be serious so getting medical insurance would have been next to impossible and not affordable.
So he stayed on the expensive Cobra and my daughters and I took out crap insurance that we hope covers catastrophic medical events. So far, nothing major but our out of pocket has been a huge expense. We were thrilled that we could keep our daughters on our policy until they were 26. Our older daughter was finishing up grad school and the younger one is still in college.
This last year has been a little more difficult in that my husband has not been picking up as much work in his consulting business as he did the previous year and our expenses increased due to insurance and elderly parents that are now experiencing all the problems that getting very old entails.
So we were very anxious to get on the heathcare.gov site and sign up for insurance. I had already gotten the "we are going to cancel your policy and throw you into this more expensive one if you don't call us" letter from our insurance company. They had no information about any policy available with the ACA. We tried the the first day it opened and disaster. We live in Pennsylvania and our craptastic republican governor did not accept the financial aid offered to the medicaid program and so did not set up a state website. So we had to use the national site.
For these six weeks, we tried every day. We tried all hours of the night and day (I have insomnia and tried in the middle of the night a lot). We called, we chatted, we tried an insurance agent and finally I tried contacting the insurance companies that were supposedly offering ACA policies in our county. Blue Cross/Blue Shield has helpful although I had to transfer to a lot of people before I found someone who knew a little something about what policies were offered. But she didn't know enough. I could not say the same for Aetna. No one knew anything and kept directing me to their website. Their website was not user friendly and there was nothing about ACA policies.
So after reading a few diaries here that suggested making a new account, I tried it. It worked! We are enrolled! Oh happy days! The site now works, the pages load in normal time. I don't know why one cannot use a previous account and I hope they fix that glitch. The site is working.
The republicans can now stop clutching their pearls, get off the fainting couch and put away the smelling salts.