One Oregon mother says that she is unable to afford health insurance for her and her 18-month-old son because it’s too expensive.
Kate Holly, 33, tells KOIN-TV that she originally championed President Barack Obama’s signature health care law because she thought it would help people in her situation.
“I’ve been a cheerleader for the Affordable Care Act since I heard about it and I assumed that it was designed for people in my situation,” Holly, a freelance yoga instructor, told KOIN. “I was planning on using the Affordable Care Act and I had done the online calculator in advance to make sure I was going to be able to afford it.”
Holly’s husband works for a non-profit organization that pays for his health care, but the couple is unable to afford to have her and their son covered under his plan. And she’s been told their combined income is too much to qualify for a subsidized health care plan under Cover Oregon.This is what you get for ignoring adult warnings that there is no free lunch. The Hollys must make reasonably good money, because two adults in Idaho still get a substantial subsidy at $62,000 per year. I would expect with a child in Oregon, the number would be quite a bit higher.
There are people with very low incomes who have a strong claim on our sympathies for their inability to afford health insurance (especially now that the Unaffordable Care Act has made it even more expensive than it used to be). But this does not seem to be one of them.
I do wonder how much of the unaffordability problem is related to consumer purchasing habits. I look at the cost of smart phone data plans, and how many young people seem to think that having a plain old cell phone is just not possible -- and I wonder how much of the "we need governmental help for health insurance even though we are in the high end of the five figure annual house income range" is really, "We like nice things, and think that stuff we really dont care that much about should be subsidized." I worked with someone some years ago who insisted that the government needed to provide health insurance because it was too expensive -- but he drove a nearly new Audi A8. These arent cheap.
UPDATE: A reader points out that the story missed something rather important: if you have access to group health insurance through a spouse, you are not eligible for the exchanges. The complaint is that the insurance through her husbands employer was too expensive. Well, yes, but the Unaffordable Care Act was not supposed to solve that problem, and actually made it worse, by mandating various coverages that were not there before.
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