Limbaugh is giving bad advice. The first year's window for enrollment in the exchanges - for the year 2014 - is 10/1/2013 to 3/31/2014. The second year's - for the year 2015 - is October 10/1/2014 to 12/31/2014. Anyone who tries to enroll outside of those windows is out of luck, and will have to pay his own medical expenses out of pocket until coverage is available. There is no pre-existing condition restriction on getting insurance, but there are fixed enrollment periods. Anyone who misses the deadlines is locked out for a year.
You beat me to it!
Unless they can find an out-of-exchange individual policy. I’m not sure whether anybody’ll be writing them, though.
During my pre-retirement period, I carried individual coverage under HIPAA’s “shall issue” coverage because of pre-existing conditions. That coverage was only about 20 percent more than my COBRA’d coverage had been, which leads me to the conclusion that these big bumps aren’t primarily coming from the pre-existing rule, but are from other aspects of O’care.
I’m betting that when you actually add up the costs O’Care has increased for insurance companies, there’ll be more of them from the freebees they gave to the voters than from addressing the flaws in the system that they campaigned on.
The “free preventive service” feature, for example, guarantees that they’ll have a claim from almost everybody in the pool. So that alone’ll boost the premiums by a couple of hundred bucks a year. When the “no lifetime max” provision goes back into effect, it’ll have an impact too. And the “free birth control” will produce claims from a third of the insured.