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Hello all you other gainfully employed chumps paying for your own health care insurance. I just wanted you to know something I've found out. If you have a BRONZE plan like I do, because you are paying for it yourself and can't afford anything else, you are paying a $6,000 deductible per person before you can file a single claim to perhaps get any benefit. Meanwhile, people who have subsidized plans because they aren't working or not working or not earning very much get the vaunted SILVER plan! And you are paying for it. You are paying for a plan...

Most of us know that it could cost us everything we own if we go to a hospital that isn’t covered by our insurance plan. But what if you’re unconscious and have no say in the matter? That’s the case for a Wisconsin woman who owes $50,000 to a hospital that claims she should just pay up and be happy she’s still alive. The woman tells WISC-TV [via Reddit] that in Sept. 2013 she went into cardiac arrest and was taken by ambulance to a hospital that was out of her insurance network instead of the one — only a...

It must have pained the New York Times to publish its article about how many ObamaCare customers fear to make use of their taxpayer-subsidized, hyper-regulated benefits because the deductibles are so high.  It's a devastating indictment of the Affordable Care Act, cutting deep into the very small number of Americans who actually find the ACA somewhat useful.   Not only does ObamaCare have low approval ratings from the American public at large, it doesn't even score well among the group it was nominally intended to benefit most directly, the uninsured.     Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this...

As the New York Times explains, Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring. But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year’s brain scan and hoping for the best. “To spend thousands of dollars just making...

As the mother of two chronically ill children, I have long faced high health care costs. My sons suffer from a rare bone-marrow failure syndrome called Shwachman-Diamond syndrome and have secondary mitochondrial disease that requires treatment with a broad range of expensive medications. We averaged $10,000 to $12,000 a year in billed out-of-pocket medical expenses before Obamacare became law. In 2013, we incurred just over $27,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation has more than doubled our yearly medical costs. Having read the then-proposed Affordable Care Act in 2010, I was skeptical of the legislation from...

John and Dawn DiMarco signed up for an Affordable Care Act plan through the state health insurance exchange during open enrollment. They received their insurance card and were covered but their bill was thousands of dollars more than advertised. They spent weeks going back and forth with various state agencies and the insurance company to try and get answers. Then, this month, their carrier, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, sent them a cancellation notice. NBC Connecticut contacted Access Health CT on Tuesday and they told us it has to do with a computer issue with their vendor. UPDATE: A spokesperson...

A devastating new McKinsey & Co. report finds that Obamacare's purported purpose – providing coverage for the previously uninsured – has failed. The report concludes that 74% of Obamacare enrollees at the end of the first open enrollment period already had insurance; just 26% reported being previously uninsured. Of those who were previously uninsured, the figure drops to only 22% when considered alongside whether the individual has activated his plan by paying his first month's premium. According to the Associated Press, at least 4.7 million Americans had their health insurance plans canceled due to Obamacare. Many of those individuals simply...

Listen to Emilie, from Tennessee tell her experiences with ObamaCare.

've Been Trying Since November—But I Still Can't Sign Up for Obamacare Ike Brannon February 7, 2014 9:01 AM Despite my earnest intentions, my family and I are still not covered on the Washington, D.C. Obamacare exchange. I am beginning to despair that I will ever obtain insurance from the exchange. To briefly recap my ordeal (you can read my previous piece here) I went to the D.C. Health Link web page in early November to sign up my family. It was not as straightforward as I anticipated: The first few times I tried to enter the names and vitals...

Go easy on me. I hope "chat" was a good place for a vanity. So, The other night I woke up with a killer pain in my chest. Having prior heart troubles and dealing with high blood pressure I thought the worst. Jetted off to the hospital with the wife (we are a 20 minute drive and figured that is where the ambulance was stationed. there was one there) and got in the door, told um chest pains and right in to a room I went. Did vitals, ekg, blood drawn and all that. Not a heart attack. Given a...

Welcome to the new regime, America. Meanwhile in Illinois, a surgeon chose to operate on a female patient even though his office couldn't verify whether she was covered by an Obamacare "bronze" plan she and her husband signed up for in mid-December. A receptionist reportedly spent two hours on the phone with the insurance company seeking answers, but got none. The doctor told the Associated Press that many of his patients are experiencing "tremendous uncertainty and anxiety" because of the new law. A 61-year-old Illinois woman with pre-existing conditions had a hard time obtaining coverage because Obamacare's website wouldn't let...

Joan Carrico, a 60-year old registered nurse who has been fighting cancer for the past six years, shared her her Obamacare experience with CNBC.com in November. She liked her insurance policy but unexpectedly received a cancellation notice with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act despite the president's assurances that "If you like your plan you can keep it." And, like many others, she had trouble logging on to the HealthCare.gov wesite. Since then, the president has granted a one-year extension for those who received cancellation notices and the website has improved — but there's still a lot to sort...

I was wondering what Freepers are doing with their own health insurance needs. How have you been impacted by ObamaCare? What are your plans to secure health insurance? What is your advise for others? Perhaps we can share some insights and inform each other. I am a self employed 63 year old married male. Neither my wife nor I have had health insurance for years. We are both fortunately, very healthy. Wife takes thyroid and estrogen hormone replacement medications. I take none. I pay out of pocket for her meds and doctors when needed. I do not plan to enroll...

Long Islander Cornelius Kelly found it would be no problem to secure a family plan for his wife and three older kids through New York’s health-care exchange, but his 18-month-old daughter was out in the cold. The baby would need her own insurance policy. “I couldn’t believe what I was being told,” said the dad from East Quogue, in Suffolk. Kelly said he was no fan of the Affordable Care Act, but when he received notice a few weeks ago that his current insurance plan was being canceled, he tried the New York State of Health Web site.

It was tragic that Bill Elliot of South Carolina was stricken with cancer; reassuring that his excellent insurance covered his expensive but medically advanced treatment and he was doing well. And then came another tragedy--in the form of an elitist, totalitarian, Know It All Government, almost worse than the cancer. The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, deemed Elliot's fine insurance policy unacceptable--probably because it didn't include maternity coverage--and offered him another policy with higher, "affordable" premiums that Elliot couldn't afford. As he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News, he didn't want to burden his family with the unaffordable affordable premiums so...

(per letter to customer-me) Effective 03/08/2014 INOVA Mt Vernon Hospital will no longer accept Humana's regional PPO. We switched to that PPO for 2013; had had PFFS and are checking to see if that plan will be accepted. I have a call out to our Humana rep to see if (as I suspect) this includes the entire INOVA system or just Mt Vernon (nearest to home).

Bob and Janet Cubbler freely admit that they're not the most technologically savvy couple around. But when it counts, what they may be is just a little more determined than most. "I'll try something, and try it, and try it again," says Bob. Which is exactly what he had to do when searching for a new insurance plan for Janet on the federal government's online marketplace, a site that has been paralyzed with problems. "It's very frustrating. I'm retired," Bob says. "So I have a lot of time. But I probably, for a long number of days, went on every...

Here’s another victim of President Lucifer’s Obamacare. Bill Elliott has cancer. He had a healthcare plan that had paid for “just about everything” of his cancer treatment, including pharmaceuticals and medical devices like MRI. He had doctors whom he “loved” and his premium was $180 a month. But Elliott, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, got a cancellation notice from his medical insurance BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE. So Elliott tried to find a new health plan that would take him. But his insurance premium will be $1,500 a month — an increase of 833% from his old premium. An MRI...

DENVER (CBS4) - President Barack Obamais apologizing to Americans who are losing their current health insurance plans. Millions of people are getting cancellation notices, including about 250,000 Coloradans. For years the president said that those who like their current plan would be able to keep it, but it turns out that’s not the case.

San Francisco architect Lee Hammack says he and his wife, JoEllen Brothers, are “cradle Democrats.” They have donated to the liberal group Organizing for America and worked the phone banks a year ago for President Obama’s re-election. Since 1995, Hammack and Brothers have received their health coverage from Kaiser Permanente, where Brothers worked until 2009 as a dietitian and diabetes educator. “We’ve both been in very good health all of our lives – exercise, don’t smoke, drink lightly, healthy weight, no health issues, and so on,” Hammack told me. The couple — Lee, 60, and JoEllen, 59 — have been...