My question is what can an angrybear do to help people who received a scary letter from their insurance company informing them that their mininsurance is cancelled and offering them a chance to pay 10 times as much. I think it is easy to provide useful links.
So I will soon consider the case of John Doe a single father with 2 children who lives in zip code 32308 (a random 5 digit number). He paid$45 per month for health non insurance for himself and is offered a $1393 month plan by Boringsong yellow shield (amount and insurance company name totally fictional and not at all reminiscent of a fine firm which is sending completely different letters)
OK time stamp 15:31 pm Rome time
First www.healthsherpa.com (set up by public spirited nerds) $555.24 per month for 3
Time stamp 15:35 Rome time (3 mintes including figuring out how to set for 3 people when default is 1)
OK now what about a subsidy ? The site which works (untill millions try to use it) is http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/ (found it remembering only kff.org from their main page). Family income $60,000 subsidy $554 a year
“you could enroll in a Bronze plan for about $4,906 per year (which is 8.18% of your household income, after taking into account $554 in subsidies).”
time stamp 15:40 Rome time
OK now let’s try the dread www.healtcare.gov but just window shop. Window shopping has been available for over a month.
https://www.healthcare.gov/find-premium-estimates/
Oh crap I need the county and have to find what county includes zip code. Tallahassee Leon country Fla
http://www.zip-codes.com/zip-code/32308/zip-code-32308.asp
Bronze Bue options essential. Estimate $ 482.07
Hmm the numbers aren’t the same (it depends on whether I entered ages of kids I think)
tme stam 15:48
I get answers from three sites (all clearly approximate) in 17 minutes.
Some of that time is navagating sites (to get to the useful links above) and figuring out what county I’m pretending to live in.
www.healthcare.gov worked as designed. Pages loaded quickly and there were no error messages. However, it was verrry patronizing insisting on telling me what minimum benefits are and reminding me again and again that I would probably get a subsidy but that I better to to kff.org for a guess as to what it might be, because no way is a Federal site going to even hint at an amount without John Doe’s social security number etc.