I woke up Monday morning, sun beaming down on Bellingham and decided to get insane. What I mean is that I decided to learn more about health care in the US. As a massage therapist who bills insurance I know a little – mostly how frustrating things can be for people to get care. I also know as a patient how surprising things can get when you or a loved one tries to use their insurance, think waiting periods for pre-existing conditions.
However, what the recent health care bills say are a total mystery. I’ve read synopsis’ of them (yes there are two, one setting precedents and one fixing problems with the first as I understand it). But does one really know the health care bills if they don’t read the actual pages of the bills?
So here is day one: searching the internet for the reform bills or whatever they are called.
… searching…
… searching…
…still searching…
I didn’t know where to start so I put in longer strings of search info into google. “US health care reform” and a few others. I searched for a site specifically for the health care reform, I pulled up official sites for the White House and the government as a whole thinking I might be able to find links…
…searching…
Remember I don’t know what they are called exactly. “The Affordable Health Care Act”….This is what the White House website calls it. Wikipedia called it “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. I chose to use this name to search in google again. Just pasting it in I was given options to choose from, I chose “patient protection and affordable care act pdf” because the other bills I’ve read have been uploaded as pdfs as well. Made sense to me.
In total I think it took me 10 minutes or less to find it. As far as I know the link I found is the correct one. I’ll let you know if I got it wrong. It wasn’t too bad. In the past I’ve searched for it before and felt like I could never find it. Now, I see that unless you know how to look for the law, it’s possible to be looking for awhile before you stumble across it. But whatever.
Stay tuned for my piece on what the White House says about it and how helpful that site was for understanding it.
I did my own similar research recently…also I did research on personal health coverage, as I don’t have health coverage through my employment. bad news for now! maybe the ‘reform’ will improve over time? links from the government websites took me to regular distributors for health coverage. for over $100 a month, i CAN get health coverage. but, it will include a $50,000 deductible. which means, before i am actually covered, i pay the first 50,000. for $180 a month, the deductible is only $25,000! so – this is useful, if i have a life threatening illness, and thousands of dollars saved. if not, this is not useful. for coverage with little or no deductible, i must spend over $300 a month, normally around $500 a month. cannot do! so i remain without coverage.
i should probably add for relevancy, my research for health insurance was done with my own statistics – 30 years old, non-smoker, no health issues.
so, I will be interested to see what you discover, and will check back
What health insurance company was that? That’s absolutely insane – $50,000 deductible isn’t reasonable at all. I used a couple of the generators I found online and found some for over a $100 a month with varying deductibles. Non however had anything over a $5-10,000 deductible. I used my statistics – 27 year old female, non-smoker.