HealthCare.gov a prolonged headache, but Floridian gets coverage
Living without health insurance is like living life on eggshells. There really is danger lurking around every corner, a slip in the grocery store, a car accident or even a trip on a toy that sends someone down the stairs. Each of these could result in some massive medical bills that can be as damaging as any bodily injury.
For one Florida woman, she was living under the threat of financial injury for years now. She works as a medical transcriptionist at a small company that voted to avoid purchasing employer-sponsored health insurance. With only a $23,000 per year salary, most plans aren’t very affordable. With the new Affordable Care Act, obtaining health care no longer became a question.
Florida is a state that opted out of having its own insurance site, and so the 60-year-old woman had one option, the federal HealthCare.gov website. Hearing the predictions for opening day, she knew that she would have to plan ahead. This woman started preparing even before the website’s opening day, but nothing went as planned.
It has been a couple months since she started trying to get insurance for herself and her husband through the website. Glitches on the website prevented her from getting through to the final step. Putting in the extra effort to dial the phone number for the federal call center didn’t seem to speed up the process either. She waited on hold and after several calls, the situation hadn’t been resolved.
She was finally able to get through and obtained health insurance coverage. It will cost her only $3.19 a month with Humana. “I just instantly burst into tears,” she said after she got the confirmation of coverage. It almost seems too good to be true, she said of the fact that the process is over.
Of course, getting health insurance isn’t the only hard part. Whether an individual or a health care provider, dealing with an insurance company after a claim has been denied can be a complicated, stressful process. An insurance attorney can take the burden off the shoulders of the insured.
Source: NBC NEWS, “‘I just instantly burst into tears’: Medical worker finally gets insurance on Obamacare website,” Maggie Fox, Dec. 10, 2013
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