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Many will do nothing

TPM:

A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.

But that's not what she found. Instead, she'd be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.

...

Fast forward a month, and Donna was able to log onto Washington's marketplace and shop for insurance. And what did she find? Options. A LifeWise plan with the same deductible they offered her outside the exchange was a little cheaper. Plans with a lower deductible had the same or lower premiums as the LifeWise plan. What she ended up buying was a plan through Community Health Plan of Washington with a $250 deductible.

And crucially, she also discovered she would qualify for a federal tax subsidy that would knock her monthly premium to $80. Her daughter could enroll in Medicaid, at no cost to the family.

So here's the bottom line: If Donna had taken the default option that LifeWise offered outside of the marketplace, she would have paid nearly $1,000 more per month for a worse plan than she was able to obtain on the marketplace.

It's nice that this lady was able to get on the exchange and find a better deal and that she qualified for subsidies. But many people won't know to do this or how to do it, or will try and fail (even after the technical website problems are fixed). It's complicated. People are busy. Not everyone knows how to navigate websites. Some people aren't sophisticated or technically savvy. Some are mentally impaired.

TPM frames this story as "insurance companies are cheating people" and they've also been pushing the "media stories are misleading" angle. And that's all true. But the real problem is that the system is overly complicated. We shouldn't be relying on individual 57 years olds (or 20 year olds) to figure out if they are picking the right stuff. This is why we should have just expanded Medicare or at a minimum had a Public Option ("figure it out for me; i'll have what everyone else is having").

By fnord12 | November 4, 2013, 1:02 PM | Liberal Outrage