Obamacare Counselor Talks about his job

[ellenrr]

"The ACA took the healthcare system, which is messed up already, and then it added an application and an online shopping system on top of it, and then more layers of tax law and immigration law on top of that. It didn’t actually make the health system itself better...

Since working on this stuff, I’ve realized that it’s more a step in the wrong direction. ..

It’s a complete farce. On the surface, individuals have all these choices, but I can’t really predict what will be best, and the patient can’t either. That’s one of the problems with the fact that all this is privatized. "

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17470/obamacare_counselor

[NYC_SKP]

2. Utter bullshit. Tell the millions who now have coverage...

Who didn't before. Tell the individual payers like who say premiums slashed!

What are you upset about, that you didn't get it for free?

[NYC_SKP]

3. The author must be a bagger a bigot or just stupid.

It's not that hard where I live, simplified from prior years and far more affordable.

I don't know about other states, I'm in California.

[JaneyVee]

5. Super easy here in NYC as well.

[MindPilot]

6. My experience has been completely different.

My SO is unemployed and has been attempting to sign up with CoveredCalifornia for weeks. The web site is very counter-intuitive, it seems unless your income fits into a particular pattern, it just dumps you out into medical/medicaid. We spent several hours last week, trying to get the income to work out right, but changes you make aren't reflected on the site. If you have income from sources that don't fit neatly into the wages/unemployment category, you're screwed because it requires you to project income for the upcoming year, when you have no clue what that might be.

And good luck getting anyone on the phone or getting time with a counselor. Just the fact that there needs to be a counselor tells me that it is way too complicated. As we commented to each other while we were trying to figure it out, if we--two technically sophisticated people with college degrees--are having trouble getting the desired output, what of people don't know how do algebra on a white board trying to reverse engineer the calculations to make the damn thing work?

I agree with the OP.