For the past month I’ve been trying to get our insurance plan set for 2017. I don’t get insurance through my work, and my husband is self-employed, so for the past few years we have gotten insurance through the health exchange. It’s a mess between the health exchange in my state (which did its own and not the Federal one) and the state Medicaid website. Now with 2 days until the deadline to enroll, I’m still fighting with them trying to get their systems to talk to each other so that I can pick a plan for my family. I honestly have lost track of how many hours I have spent on hold and/or talking to representatives who simply point their fingers at the other team and say the issue is with someone else.
In the meanwhile, I’m shopping plans as a guest just by entering our ages, sex, tobacco status, and county of residence. Below are the 3 best plans available in our area. At this point, we have gone from 3 options to just 1 insurance company in the exchange in our part of the state, so it’s a total monopoly. We also live in one of the 2 most expensive counties in the state for health insurance because of the demographic (construction workers and outdoor adventurers) who are more likely to get hurt and use their insurance I guess. Add to this the fact that premiums have gone up roughly 40% in our area, and yeah… fuck this shit.
The three plans show below are the cheapest option available for our totally healthy family of 4, the cheapest HSA plan available (which I generally use so that we can at least put away some income pre-tax to use for health related bills), and the most expensive (i.e. supposedly the best) plan available. I mean, seriously? This is like having to pay another mortgage.
I hate insurance. It was broken before. It’s broken now. And I don’t know how to fix it. But I hate it.