(NEW YORK POST)
By Justin Haskins
“I’m sorry sir,” the polite Healthcare.gov customer-service agent said. “There’s nothing I can do. You’re either going to have to enroll in Medicaid or you’re going to have to pay the full health-insurance rate.”
“The rate you quoted earlier?” I asked. “That’s nearly 30 percent higher than my current insurance bill, I just can’t afford it.”
“You’ll have to pay the full rate, yes,” the agent replied.
“I don’t understand,” I explained. “I have plenty of money to pay you a reasonable rate, but I can’t afford to pay the same rate a millionaire would be asked to pay. Why can’t I just receive a partial subsidy? I’m willing to pay more than what Medicaid offers.”
“Sir, that’s just not how the system works.”
Right. That’s not how ObamaCare works; it doesn’t work at all.
I was 26 when my graduate school informed me in 2013 that thanks to “usage rates of the plan, changing health-insurance regulations, and the administrative workload that is involved in managing a plan” after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, students could no longer buy health coverage through the school.
So much for President Obama’s promises of “if you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.”
I had health insurance. I liked it. But that plan disappeared.
And college officials confirmed my suspicion that ObamaCare was the culprit. “It’s just too expensive to operate under the new health-care regulations,” I was told.
So there I was: A struggling grad student with no health insurance, and unable to afford unsubsidized ObamaCare plans I’d hardly, if ever, use.
But Uncle Sam was there on his white horse, ready to save my day with . . . Medicaid?
