I am sorry to have to say that this is not snark. I'm seriously confused and am hoping that writing this that someone out there will have answers. I've tried searching the Internet, and have yet to find anybody discussing this issue much less explaining it.
So far my experiences at Healthcare.gov have not been the best. I started out by entering my husband's social security number incorrectly, and spent weeks trying to fix that problem. Finally, I created a second account and was able to get to the point where I was offered a choice of plans. There were so many plans it was confusing. Something like 96 plans. I had a lot of other things going on in my life, so I decided to put off making a decision until things settled down.
Yesterday afternoon I logged into Healthcare.gov (after spending a little time in the waiting room). When I initially created my account, I was told that I qualified for a $107 subsidy. Before selecting a plan, I indicated that I wanted to use all of it. Over the last couple of weeks while deciding which plan I wanted to go with, and learning more about how all this works when you file your income taxes, I decided I didn't want to use any of the subsidy. My reason is that my income fluctuates and I might earn a lot more next year than this year, and then I would owe the subsidy back. I would much rather just take the deduction from what I owe at the end of 2014 if I still qualify rather than have to pay it back.
Anyway, I signed in yesterday and my choice of 96 plans had been drastically reduced to only 16 plans. Part of the reason I was able to determine was because there were no plans available from Florida Blue (Florida Blue Cross/Blue Shield) when a few weeks ago there were a lot of plans available from Florida Blue. I tried to change the amount of the subsidy to use to $0 and it would not let me. Every time it reverted back to the $107. So they haven't fixed the ability to change choices once you've entered something.
I called the toll-free number and asked why all the plans had gone away, especially the Florida Blue ones. The woman on the other end of the phone said that there were some glitches they were dealing with and that I should wait a few hours and try again. I waited more than a few hours. I waited an entire day until this afternoon. This time when I logged in my subsidy had increased from $107 to $196, and now there were only 9 plans to select from. Ugh!
Since I didn't want to use the subsidy, the easiest thing to do was delete the application and start over from scratch. This time I indicated that I didn't want to apply for the subsidy, so I didn't have to enter all the financial details. When I was done, I had the choice of 9 plans. What happened to the other 7 that were there yesterday? It looks like f I wait much longer to select a plan, there won't be any plans to select from the way they are slowly disappearing. Any insights anybody has about why plans are disappearing would be greatly appreciated.