… but I’m a blogger. You may know today is the deadline for obtaining health insurance through Healthcare. gov and its local tentacles. I’ll spare you most of the details but here are a few observations:
Comparing available plans works fairly well. What’s unclear is why one provider (say, BlueCross) has more than one Silver plan (Community vs Advantage; Pres has Bronze A, B, C, and D). On close inspection, it appears one pays more for Advantage without any increase in benefits. Can that be true?
One can go directly to an insurer, bypassing the central sites. Blue Cross does not list the cheaper “Community” plans on their website, therefore you pay more to go directly to BCBS. WTF?
Insurance is still ridiculously complex: deductibles, co-pay vs co-insurance, out-of-pocket, in or out of network, HMO vs PPO (really? still?).
All of this I blame on the Insurance Industry. But, now on to healthcare.gov.
Can you imagine if you got “we’re too busy” or “page not found” on Amazon? NEVER.
In setting up an account, you are told SSN is optional. SSN is NOT optional. For example, a friend skipped SSN and was “successful” in buying coverage from BCBS. But BCBS uses SSN for records. She’s still having trouble getting them to acknowledge payment, though eventually she got a card from them.
You CANNOT enter your SSN after the setup of an account. I left out SSN, got all the way to the end, got “confirmation” of insurance with a note that I had to verify my citizenship. At that point, there is no option to enter an SSN. There is an option to upload one’s passport but no indication of acceptable format — it just hangs for me.
I saw one opportunity to Pay Now for my first premium. When I selected that button, my browser blocked the pop-up. When I told my browser to allow popups from healthcare.gov, it reloaded the page and the button was gone.
I have documentation indicating that my initial application was successful but that I need to prove I’m a citizen and make a payment, neither of which I can do. So, do I have insurance?
