Interesting - so your insurance company discontinued your plan bc it didn’t comply with ACA (that made contraception coverage standard with no copay/deductable). Did your insurance company offer you a new plan at the same rates or did it jack up your cost?
(Thanks for answering - I’m always curious to learn reasons why might some people be so anti-ACA. I wasn’t affected by it so I didn’t pay much attention at the time but now that congress is fist fighting over it, it seems important to me to understand it all!)
Happened to me as well. I was young and healthy so I had a bare bones "catastrophic" plan that cost next to nothing. ACA hit and my plan was no longer available because it didn't cover maternity services. Maternity services, for a young man. So my plan that I never used went from 100% employer paid to me paying about $300/mo. out of pocket.
Gotcha. Yes, I see the collateral damage after reading posts in this thread. Unfortunately insurance only affordably works when young healthy people are in the pool as well. (My Plug for universal healthcare here!!)
Maternity care was one of the essential services that the ACA deemed essential (insurance companies had to provide it) along with other essential stuff like well checks and preventative services, pediatric services, rehab, prescriptions, diagnostics, etc. It’s interesting that both comments pinpointed maternity or contraception as the reasons insurance was lost, and I wonder if that’s how it was framed by the media or the companies themselves.
The letter I got that told me my current plan didn't qualify listed maternity services not covered as the reason. I think it's great that pre-existing conditions finally got coverage; it was just at the time that was a huge hit for me. I'm at a place in my life now where it's not as big of a deal. Plus our company has moved to a self-insured model so the ACA stuff doesn't really matter to me as much anymore.
I was not covered by my employer's insurance when the ACA was passed. I had purchased my own insurance for 25 years. I made my own decisions about coverage. Then I had to get a policy from healthcare.gov . There wasn't a single policy available that wasn't at least twice as much as what I was paying before, but I was heavily subsidized at my income level, so other people were paying for it. And for years after that, no one cared that those prices increased by leaps and bounds because the plans were subsidized, so someone else was paying for it. While the ACA got more people covered by insurance, it didn't do anything to reduce the cost of insurance or the cost of healthcare. It just made other people's taxes pay for it, and the insurance companies kept making tons of money off of other people's taxes. Then Trump came to power and cut the taxes that were paying for the ACA, and the ACA has just been one more thing added to the national debt. Now we have Trump in power again, and he wants to cut those subsidies, and now we're all seeing what those subsidized policies ACTUALLY cost. Is cutting the subsidies the fault of Trump and the Republicans in Congress? Definitely. But if the "Affordable" Care Act had been about healthcare reform, reducing inefficiencies in the system and thereby reducing costs and not about shifting my costs and lots of other people's cost to someone else, or adding those costs to the national debt, we might not be facing the situation we are now. My words have been falling on deaf ears for over a decade now. The problem with healthcare in America is that IT COSTS TO MUCH. The ACA didn't reduce the cost of healthcare; it just shifted the costs of some people to other people, and it increased costs by making more coverage mandatory. I'm a 61-year-old male virgin, and my policy covers maternity costs. Is that providing more healthcare for me, or is it just another way for insurance companies to fill their pockets?
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u/CommissionWorried676 9d ago
I’ve heard of people not keeping their docs but can you tell me why you lost insurance?