Sympathy factor pegged at zero.

Supporting — but abandoning — Obamacare — Chicago Tribune

For the first time in my professional life, I am in the position that I have to buy my own health care insurance. I had heard people were having difficulty with the process, but recently I have written and edited a lot of information about the Affordable Care Act and the new health insurance exchanges, so I felt familiar with the territory and ready to sign up. In addition, my wife is an attorney with a master’s degree in education, so I knew that with our two minds on the case, the process would be a snap.

And then two days after we started, our patience snapped, and we decided to forgo buying insurance off of the exchange to purchase a policy on the open market at about five times the rate we were quoted on the exchange.

I have always had very high hopes for Obamacare, and still do, but if our experience mirrors that of other people’s, then its future could be dim.

This is basically what we went through during our two-day frustration fest:

It was confusing from the start. We logged on to HealthCare.gov, put in detailed information about our entire family, found a great plan at a great price and then started the application process.

At first we tried to apply online by ourselves. We tried to answer the questions, but at the end of the process, the system told us that only my wife qualified for a plan on the exchange at a reduced rate, which made no sense because she is the only one of us who is working consistently right now, though she does not have employer-based insurance.

So we called the hotline to ask questions. A very nice and patient woman worked with us, but she wasn’t able to give us the answers we needed. She seemed almost as confused as we were. She offered to help redo the application with us over the phone. And so a great guessing game began as we wound our way through the online questionnaire with her covering issues like how much money we think we might make in 2014 and did we currently have insurance available to us (the site confusingly skirts around the issue of COBRA coverage). […]

I want the president’s health care reform policies to succeed, but if some serious changes are not made to the basic underpinnings of the system, then I fear that many people will back out the way we had to do.

HT: BattleSwarm