Letters to the Editor 1-16-14

Not confusing
Editor: Your front-page story last week emphasized how confusing signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act can be. While that may have been the case for some, the experience in our family was the opposite. We found that it was far less confusing to enroll in Covered California, than it was to buy health insurance on the open market, which we had to do last year when our Cal-Cobra ran out.
With Covered California I created an account, filled in basic information, stated income for each family member, and picked a family insurance plan within 20 minutes. Covered California emailed a confirmation; I called the insurance company and paid the premium on Jan. 6.
Contrast that experience with what we had to go through under the old system. To begin with, when it comes to confusion, comparing insurance offerings was the essence of confusion. The variety of lifetime caps, of procedures covered or not, and deductibles and co-pays, etc, made it impossible for the buyer to compare. Under the ACA we are comparing like plans to like plans.
When it comes to tedium and hours invested in applications, nothing in the ACA comes remotely close. Last year I filled out five separate applications for each family member. Each application was 24 pages long. Each one asked endless questions about each and every encounter with the health care system in the last 5 to 10 years, depending.
Then came the processing, equally as time consuming. Just keeping track of the progress of each application was an adventure in insurance company bureaucracy. On top of that, the company claimed to have lost two of the applications, so I had to fill out two replacements.
For anyone who is confused about the ACA, I recommend calling the county department of Human Services at 565-5800. I found the people who took my calls to be reliable, helpful, and courteous and the wait times were short. The County also has a helpful web page at www.sonoma-county.org/healthcarereform.
Deborah Dobish
Sebastopol