I am fortunate to have health insurance through my husband's employer, so I will not need to get insurance through the exchanges. However, I was curious to see what type of coverage would be available and what the cost would be for my family if, for example, my husband was self-employed. I was also curious because my husband's company has decided to phase out the type of typical health coverage we've had for years and go with a Corporate Health Care Exchange.
So, first things first. Each time I signed into the healthcare.gov account I created I was never able to get beyond the initial log in. More precisley, I could log in, but kept getting a message that read: "URL success" and a blank white screen. I tried several times over the last 2 weeks to get past that blank white screen to no avail. (and yes, I now know that I can see plan pricing and more without actually applying for coverage) So today it occurred to me that I should try using the healthcare.gov site with a different browser, just to see. My husband's company has it's own Intranet that is only accessible through Internet Explorer and we're Google Chrome users, so the only time we use Explorer is to access his Intranet...so I knew it was possible that a browser could cause issues viewing certain websites. I logged into my healthcare.gov account using Exporer and...suprise, suprise...I easily got through. It made me wonder whether others are having issues using the website with Google Chrome. So, if you're a Chrome user and have continuing issues like those I described, try another browser!
Currently our health insurance is through Cigna, a PPO plan that has a family deductible of $6,000 before the 70% coinsurance. (two years ago we had a PPO plan with a family deductible of around $4,000 and provided 80% co-insurance and we thought THAT kind of sucked! Ha!) His company is now switching to a Corporate Health Care Exchange through Aon Hewitt. We can't enroll (or even see plans or pricing details for another week) but have a handy brochure with plenty of stock pictures of attractive people smiling and posing with salads and shiny red apples. Has anyone here used a Corporate Exchange and if so, what was your experience? The company is touting it as a big "win" for the employees because we'll have a lot more choices but I know that it's really about saving the company money. If his company and so many others really wanted to save money on their ever increasing health care costs for their employees they'd support a single payer system. You would think Corporate America would be lobbying hard for a proven health care delivery system that would essentially save them billions. Duh. Yet not surprisingly those corporate types are driven by ideology as much, if not more, than profit. The book "The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite" by Mark Mizruchi touches on this, an excerpt:
I've interviewed some Fortune 500 CEOs and HR officials. You would think that it would be in the interest of most American companies, both large and small, to support a single-payer system like Canada's. According to my calculations, in 2009, the Fortune 500 alone spent $375 billion on health care for their employees. Now, if we had a Canadian-style system here, that cost would not be zero, because it would be compensated for in higher taxes. But the cost would be spread throughout the entire population. so it would seem to be in the interest of American companies to not have to provide health-care to their employees, and particularly small business.
So the question is why they would be so opposed to it. The only thing I can think of is just ideology. They just don't like the idea of government involvement.