Health re-form: Why I love Obamacare

Self-employed; too young for Medicare.  If that doesn't describe you, you have no idea how byzantine health insurance can become.  You'll never find anything like it in the writings of Franz Kafka, because it is too terrifying. When I applied for individual insurance, it took 6 hours to fill out the form.  After three hours of follow-up phone conversations, the insurance company refused to cover the female half of my family (who, thank God, are healthy) at any price.  My family finally got covered, praise the Lord, although I should point out that there is something wrong if divine intervention is needed in this neck of the woods.

Given what it took to get coverage, a competitor couldn't pay me enough to go to the trouble of switching companies, something that my insurance companies (one for the males, and one for the females) surely take into account when they relentlessly raise their prices.  

When printed, the form I had to fill out was 20 pages.  As if that weren't Kafkaesque enough, the insurance company required payment of a full month's coverage in advance, even though they reserved the right to decline coverage, a right that, in about two weeks time, they exercised.  Moreover, if I made a mistake in reciting our medical history, they reserved the right to cancel the coverage in the future.  Naturally, when I applied to a different insurance company for coverage of the female half of my family, I had to start over with a different form of roughly the same length.

Thanks to Obamacare, that form is about to get a lot shorter.  The draft form for 2014 coverage is only 4 pages. Looking through it, there are precisely the right number of questions about medical history, which is to say, none. As far as I can tell, I need to fill out page 2 for myself, fill out page 3 for my family, and then sign and date page 4.  And the single form will work for any of four insurance companies offering coverage in my region.

It's just a draft.  And it doesn't include obvious things like credit card and expiration date, or for that matter income, so as to determine if I qualify for tax credits (I don't), or which insurance company I want to go with, or which plan.  But wall, handwriting is on.  Thanks to Obamacare, in 2014 the individual health insurance market will be able to function properly.