“People who have jobs with decent benefits may not realize how tricky life in the United States is for people who don’t.” David Owen writes about navigating the American health-care system as a freelancer—and finally getting covered by Medicare.
When my grandson was three, he picked up a raisin that someone had stepped on. It was flat and round. He held it by the edges with the tips of his fingers, turned it like a steering wheel, and said, “Dwive, dwive, dwive. Dwive, dwive, dwive.” He was annoyed at how long he was going to have to wait to be old enough to get his license.
When my Writers Guild year ended, I could have kept the coverage going for another eighteen months by paying for it myself, under the terms of the federallaw, but the premiums were higher than we could afford, so we went back to the policy we’d had before—which I’d actually kept paying for, because I was afraid of losing it. A couple of years later, I did lose it: the insurer stopped offering individual plans to anyone, and we were on our own.
Not long afterward, I learned that negotiation has its limits. Ann had hand surgery, performed by a doctor who, amazingly, either had an agreement with American Republic or was willing to operate for what it was willing to pay. A few weeks later, though, the doctor’s office manager called to say that, because we hadn’t met our deductible, he was going to ignore the negotiated fee and charge us full retail.
Republicans’ many efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act have been depressingly effective, and I assume that those efforts were at least partly responsible for the premium increases that Ann and I received during the next few years. Our combined monthly Obamacare premium in 2014, for a Bronze policy, was a little less than a thousand dollars; by 2020, it had doubled.
My identity questions, I figured, must have been based on information from one of my credit reports, which I’d never looked at. I was easily able to download two of the three, from Experian and TransUnion. But I couldn’t download the third, from Equifax, because its Web site wouldn’t let me in unless I correctly answered questions that were eerily similar to the ones I’d got wrong at ssa.gov—proving, I guess, that Equifax was the government’s data source.
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