Just had a look

[catsittingstill]

Looked at what our health insurance costs under the Affordable Care Act (what the Repubs call "Obamacare") would be if Kip didn't have health insurance for us through his employer. Kaiser has a calculator up; it is a best guess at the moment but more info will be available tomorrow, I understand.

Turns out that with the federal subsidy available at our level of income, our health insurance costs would be about what they are now (about $250/month) (Kip does get health insurance for both of us through his employer--I was doing this as a baseline "suppose we needed it" information gathering exercise.)

Without the subsidy our health insurance costs would be about 180% of what they are now. About $450/month.

That looks quite reasonable to me.

Comments

[doomspark]

I suspect the health insurance offered to a member of Congress FAR surpasses anything offered under the ACA. I'm equally sure that it surpasses what's provided by most employers. But anyway, the ACA doesn't affect Congress, so they don't have any incentive to CARE what it does to the working public.

BTW, when you did your comparison, did you set it to provide the exact coverage you currently have? I've not seen a definitive answer on this question yet.

[catsittingstill]

Congress has better? Well of course they do; they're mostly incredibly rich and we don't believe in treating rich and poor equally when it comes to health care (even stating the idea looks radical, doesn't it?) I don't see where I ever suggested anything different, though, so I'm not sure why you bring it up.

Did it set it to my exact coverage? No, of course not. I couldn't have done that even if I'd had the time to look up my coverage, since details of exactly what was covered were not available that day. It was set to "silver" plan, if that helps.

Frankly I don't know that I will take it that far when details do become available, since even knowing exactly what my current plan covers would take hours and I at least have all the paperwork for that. Nor do I know which doctors/hospitals would be in network for the plan (it varies from insurance company to insurance company of course, and sometimes between plan and plan even if the same insurance company offers both, and these plans will all be provided by private insurers)

I'm reasonably happy with my current insurance and don't plan to change (and we probably wouldn't be eligible for the subsidy that would make it cost about the same as what we have now if we did--since we can get insurance through Kip's employer.) So I don't see any need to sweat the details for our part.

I would definitely have liked single-payer better than this, FWIW; it's just that politically that didn't seem to be an option.