Dianne Barrette was the media's go-to
example of an Obamacare victim -- until she found out all of her options
By Elias Isquith
President Barack Obama (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) (Credit: AP)
Because
her $54 per month plan was cancelled due to Obamacare’s new higher
requirements — and because her insurance company’s recommended
replacement would cost her nearly 10 times as much — Dianne Barrette
became the face of Obamacare’s so-called victims.
But in
a new report from the New Republic,
Barrette, after factoring in her tax credits and going through her
options with reporter Jonathan Cohn, is now singing Obamacare’s praises,
even going so far as to say her previous plan’s cancellation was
“maybe” a “blessing in disguise.”
When Cohn detailed for Barrette
how much she’d be paying for far more comprehensive health insurance,
Barrette told him she’d “jump at” the chance to secure the plan. “With
my age, things can happen,” she said. “I don’t want to have bills that
could make me bankrupt. I don’t want to lose my house.”
OK,
but what can she get from Obamacare? Using plan data provided to me by
the Kaiser Family Foundation, residents of Polk County, Florida have
dozens of insurance options from which to choose. The cheapest option
for somebody of Barrette’s age has premiums of $440 a month, the most
expensive goes for $914 a month. But Barrette wouldn’t pay those prices.
Obamacare offers tax credits to people with incomes of up to four times
the poverty line, or about $45,000 for an individual. Given Barrette’s
income, she’ll be getting a tax credit worth nearly $331 a month,
according to the Kaiser Foundation’s subsidy calculator. And that tax
credit works like a discount, upfront. To figure out what she’d pay, you
subtract the value of the tax credit from the price of the plan.
Accounting
for that discount, it looks like the cheapest plan available her would
cost about $100 a month—in other words, about $50 a month more than
Barrette pays now. Obamacare divides plans into categories based on
generosity—with platinum the most generous, bronze the least generous.
This is a bronze plan and you can tell by reading the benefit summary.
It covers periodic wellness visits for free, like all plans must under
the new law. But it doesn’t pay for virtually anything else until the
beneficiary has paid $6,250 of his or her own money, the maximum
out-of-pocket allowed under Obamacare. The plan might protect Barrette
from bankruptcy, something her current plan doesn’t do, but it would do
almost nothing to insulate her from less extreme medical expenses.
[...]
For
an additional $50 or so, Barrette could apparently get the
second-cheapest silver plan. It’s from FloridaBlue, the same company
that provides Barrette with what she has now. Included in that policy:
the usual free checkup, free vision care (one exam plus one pair of
corrective lenses), free clinical lab work, and a drug plan with prices
ranging from free for some generic, mail-order drugs to $250 for some
high-end specialty drugs. It would cover primary care physician visits,
though with a $75 co-pay per visit. Other coverage—for hospitalizations,
specialist office visits, and so on—would kick in after her
out-of-pocket expenses reached an annual deductible of $5,750. Her total
out of pocket expenses could be no more than $6,250, in accordance with
the law’s maximum.
Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at
@eliasisquith, and email him at
eisquith@salon.com.
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