Tonight my son and I got him enrolled through the Affordable Care Act, but we had to do it over the telephone. Our experience was a bit more frustrating than what YaNevaNo reports in this diary, which I urge you to read for comparison:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
We live in Texas, so we had to try to go through the national web site. If we'd created an account for my son months ago, as YaNevaNo did, we might have been able to finish things on the internet. As it was, I spent about 50 minutes listening to pleasant music on hold, and the application and enrollment was just another 25 minutes.
Tonight we got my son enrolled via the Affordable Care Act
My son is now 28. For the last two years he's been on a 'student' health insurance plan which we bought through USAA, insured by Assurant, managed by Aetna. Thankfully, he hasn't needed it for anything. Tonight we enrolled him in a Blue Choice Bronze PPO plan for next year. The experience was so-so.
First we tried to apply on the internet. We first needed to create an account for my son, but only got as far as trying to pick a username and password. The ACA computer wouldn't accept his E-mail address as his username, even though it seemed to meet all the requirements and not have any prohibited characters. Finally we tried taking the "dot" out of ".edu" and that seemed to make it work. But for a password, we tried to use a pet's name and that wouldn't work, even though it met all the requirements: at least eight characters including a capital letter and a lower case letter. We thought about adding some number but decided to quit taking stabs in the dark. We phoned the 1-800 number. On the second or third round of choices the robot offered to get a representative. We asked for that, and the machine said hold time was about 30 minutes.
About 50 minutes later a gentleman came on the line. The only odd question he asked was if anybody who'd be on the policy was a felon. (Is health insurance more expensive for felons?) He asked why we picked that particular plan. I said I trust Blue Cross more than the other companies. (I probably should have said I mistrust them less.) He suggested going up to a silver plan, but my son's healthy and we don't think he'd use it. We settled on an individual plan with a $6000 out-of-pocket limit that will cost $183 a month, minus whatever the effect of the tax credit turns out to be. The tax credit could bring the annual cost down to as low as $300, depending on how much my son does or doesn't earn in 2014. If the tax credit is zero, he'll be paying a little more than for the old policy, and getting an out of pocket limit $350 less, and a free preventive health care benefit (a 100% covered physical exam and immunizations, mostly) that I don't think he had on his other plan. At $183 a month, that's more than YaNevaNo says he's paying in his diary posted this evening, but it's not clear if he's applying the tax credit to his premium. Here's his diary:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The gentleman at the ACA phone center gave us an application ID number, and a customer service phone number for Blue Cross. He said we should hear from Blue Cross in a few days, to make arrangements to pay (at least) the first month's premium. My son won't be insured until that's paid, so we'll probably start asking Blue Cross for a bill in a few days. We're not going to cancel his old policy until then.
We were finished with the phone call in about 25 minutes. It may be just as well we did it over the phone. I've heard rumors that the ACA web site has security problems and if it misbehaves it could be hackers. Does anyone know if there's any truth to that?
Anyway, I'm relieved that my son now has health insurance purchased through the federal government. The previous insurance -- sold by USAA, insured by Assurant, managed by Aetna -- sounds like it was arranged to make passing the buck easy. Each of those companies could claim one of the others was responsible if anything wasn't going right. I don't think Blue Cross would try to pass the buck back to Uncle Sam, and if they did I doubt it would get them very far.
It may be a hassle finding someone at Blue Cross who can expedite sending us a bill. I'll start by trying to use that customer service number, but last week, when I was looking for details about plans, that same number gave me the computer menu run-around. I eventually got through to a human being who knew what he was talking about at a different phone number.
So, overall, my son and I can't say the "Obamacare" web site is running smoothly. It did pretty well as far as helping us shop for plans, but we had to do the actual application over the phone. And we may have to pester and beg Blue Cross to take the first month's premium and send an insurance card. But hey, that's about how badly health insurance has usually functioned for the last 30 years or so. I suspect things will sort out in a few months.