Momsense has some good news:
Also, I have some news to report on dealing with life changes and exchange policies. I recently reported a major increase in salary (yay me!) which meant a change in the subsidy amount. The coverage will be seamless, I will just pay a lot more per month. It is manageable and still about $1,000 less than I was paying per month before I had to drop my coverage in the aftermath of the fustercluck brought to us by Wall Street and the Republicans.
DougJ passed along word that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is spending more time with her family:
Obamacare has won. And that’s why Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius can resign.
Both of these are major changes that healthcare.gov and the state level exchanges can help people deal with changes. In MomSense’s good news, she had a major change in income. She had two choices. The first was what she did, go online, notify the Exchange that her income for the rest of 2014 was going to be much higher than projected. The Exchange took the new income into consideration and reduced her subsidy. The other choice was to not report the new projected income, report it on next year’s tax return and see her tax bill go up substantially as the IRS claws back the overly generous subsidy.
Secretary Sebelius will soon experience a job loss. She will be losing her employer sponsored healthcare shortly. She has two options. The first is to go on Medicare as her exclusive insurance as she is 66 and qualified by age. The second is to COBRA her policy. If she was two years younger, she would have had a third option. She could have gone on the Exchange for an individual policy to bridge her to Medicare eligibility.
These are just two of the many qualifying events that can see people add or change their Exchange based insurnace outside of the normal open enrollment. Qualifying events are major life changes such as marriages, divorces, births, adoptions and deaths of family members, significant employment changes and moving primary residences. People with major qualifying events have thirty days from the event to go on the Exchange, update their information and potentially make a new selection of a new plan that accomodates their new situation better.
Comrade Jake
Best line I saw on the Twitter last night: Sebelius is resigning to spend more time with the 7.5M Americans who now have health insurance.
MomSense
@Comrade Jake:
That is great!
Mike E
Then there’s the other option, where the marketplace rep questions your income and places a notice on your acct that you have to send proof (pay stubs, W’s) to dhhs by the end of May. Rapture.
Mr Stagger Lee
I lost my job last year and now doing temp work, I am blessed to live in a civilized state like Washington and through their website, I got insurance again. I pay extra in co-pays and some lab work, but I will take it over the crap that the staffing firm was offering.Thank You Mr. President!
geg6
All I know is that, should the University (in another seven years) once again offer a great buyout for people over age 62, I’ll be taking it and I’ll be able to do it because of the ACA.
Matt McIrvin
Is COBRA a reasonable option for anyone in the new world? (I suppose it has the advantage of simplicity if you’re just going to be out of employer coverage for a short time.)
Yatsuno
@geg6: YAY!!! MOAR KODA TIME!!!
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
Isn’t Sebelius married to a federal judge? She’ll probably just go on his insurance.
Richard Mayhew
@Matt McIrvin: Depends — if you have a high deductible plan and you’ve already used up most/all of your deductible, it might make sense to continue COBRA instead of restarting your deductible at 0.
Linnaeus
The problem for me is that my income fluctuates from month to month, so I can’t necessarily predict if I’ll have an increase (or decrease) in income that I can notify my state’s exchange about. I have to wait until the end of the year to really know what I made. It probably will be more this year compared to last, but I don’t know how much.
HumboldtBlue
@Comrade Jake: I am one of them. I signed up just before the deadline and after speaking with my dad (30 years with Fireman’s Fund) I got a plan that will cost me a little over 100 bucks per month with a 1500 dollar deductible. I can live with that seeing as though I haven’t had health insurance since 2008 when my company changed plans and I was paying three times in premiums for three times less the benefits.
I will gladly spin Mrs. Sebelius around the dance floor once or twice.
Another note on the health care front, for those of you who continue to smoke, stop. I managed to do it and haven’t had a motherfucking cigarette in four months. I used an upper respiratory infection to get started and haven’t looked back. Quit, you’ll love yourself for it.
Mnemosyne
@Linnaeus:
It’s probably worth making an appointment with a CPA and having them help you run through a few scenarios to figure out how much you might need to save up to pay for any “overage” next year. If you end up not needing that extra savings for taxes, you can plow it into your retirement or other savings.