Sharing the Pain, Keepings One's Values

For John, BLUF:  ObamaCare is hard, even for Middle Class.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at The New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot talks about losing your insurance and trying to get signed up un the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its portal.♠  The title of the piece is "My Canceled Policy, And My Values".  Fair enough.  The lede:

In the short term, I am the kind of person for whom the Obamacare mandate is a pain in the neck.  My husband and I, both writers, have been buying health insurance on the individual market for several years, paying about a thousand dollars a month for a policy that covers us and our two children.  We were among those Americans who liked our policy: we had to choose doctors from within a network, but there were plenty to choose from, including the pediatrician we’d gone to since our kids, now teen-agers, were born.  We had no deductible and a reasonable cap on out-of-pocket expenses:  five thousand dollars a year.  We were less happy when, in early October, our insurer, CareFirst Blue Cross, raised our monthly premium by three hundred dollars with no explanation.  (The only health expenses we’d incurred in the previous year were for the annual checkups that the schools required for the kids.)  This was a big increase for us, especially since our writing income tends to fluctuate from month to month and year to year.  Then, like many of the twelve million or so Americans who buy their own insurance, we received a letter from CareFirst in late October saying that our policy would be cancelled, because it didn’t conform to Affordable Care Act requirements.  I did what I usually do in these circumstances: I procrastinated.

Then the story begins.  Ms Talbot accepts that it is all very complicated, but she wants it to work, and sends that message.

So yes, I’ll subsidize someone else’s prenatal coverage, in a more effective way than I’ve been doing by default under the current system, in which too many pregnant women show up in emergency rooms without having had such care, creating problems for themselves and their babies, and all sorts of costs for taxpayers.  And I’ll remember to be relieved that my own access to health care is guaranteed. But they had better work out the problems with the A.C.A.; if they don’t, and it doesn’t fulfill its promise of insuring the uninsured, I’m really going to feel like a chump.

I am putting her down as approving of the President's performance.  I think she sums up the views of many Progressives.  However, she could drift, as recent polls suggest is happening to others, even in Southern California, where support amongst Hispanics, Union households and women is slipping.

And, she does recognize it is a tax, even if she doesn't say so.  A tax on the Middle Class and the Healthy.  No matter what we do, that is the way it is going to be.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Yes, that is the name of the thing, sometimes called ACA and sometimes called ObamaCare.