welcome to the organic green doctor blog

i am a family physician who was diagnosed with
early mild cognitive impairment(mci) amnestic type on december 21, 2010
this is a precursor to alzheimers disease
because of this diagnosis i have opted to stop practicing medicine
this blog will be about my journey with this disease
please feel free to follow me along this path
i will continue blogging on organic gardening, green living,
solar power, rainwater collection, and healthy living
i will blog on these plus other things noted to be interesting

Monday, November 6, 2017

not yet

NOT YET

Image result for healthcare.gov logo

its not made a name change
not yet

the aca insurance is still called
obamacare

once it gets all changed
i dont see how it can be made better
it will be called
trumpcare

now this obamacare
even if you dont like it
its important

it provides insurance to close to 20 million folks
those numbers can vary a lot based on who is
writing about it and what points they want to make

for all of us
what happens to this obamacare insurance
it bleeds into the nonobamacare insurance
it seems
most folks i know or my relatives
are all on
medicare and supplements
military retirement
veterans
work health insurance

its the work health insurance that seems to affect
most of you
as the price on obamacare goes
so does the cost of your work health insurance

my biggest worry
is the lack of support for the obamacare
will leave us with poor expensive policies
for those having to buy plans on the market

if this all falls apart without support
a lot of folks like many of you
wont be able to get affordable good health insurance
no
there will be what i call junk ones
that will be taunted by many politicians
as proof of low cost insurance
that are not worth what you pay for them
plus
those preexisting conditions will hurt all of us

so
i decided to go online to search for what i could get
as insurance through the exchanges
if i lived in three places i used to live

rural arkansas
rural texas just 40 miles north of austin
santa barbara

note califronia has the best website available for this
the healthcare.gov site is sketchy at times
the difference is california has tried to make theirs work
the us government has tried to make theirs fail

so
i pretended i was 42 with a 40 year old wife who was not pregnant
with a 12 year old son and a 5 year old daughter
with a family income of $75,000

i looked at the different companies that were offered
choosing the silver plan
since you need that one to get the subsidies
i filtered out the ones that i felt like would not be a good
dependable insurance company

in california where we live there was only one choice
in texas and arkansas there were several choices
i chose long established companies
in these cases the companies were blue cross blue shield ones

so
in california
the only choice was blue shield ppo
cost per month was $605 with a monthly tax credit of $928
it had a $2500 deductible per individual $5000 per family
yearly premium around $7200 with lots of out of pocket costs

in rural arkansas
the choice i made was arkansas blue cross blue shield ppo
cost per month was $711 with a monthly tax credit of $636
it had a $8000 deductible with a $14000 maximum out of pocket limit
yearly premium around $8532

in rural texas near austin
the choice i made was blue cross blue shield hmo
from talking to folks in the healthcare provider side this one
has a restrictive choice of physicians
cost per month was $798 with a monthly tax credit of $386
it had a $5000 family deductible with a max out of pocket of $14700
yearly premium around $9576

all of these policies had a lot of extra costs involved like
copays for office visits extra costs for drugs some had limits on
office visits some had limited choices of providers

when compared to the one i helped my son buy the first year
obamacare came out
a plan that was better than the one my wife she got from work
his was a much better plan than whats available now

now
the obamacare or not yet trumpcare or aca policies dont have
the same quality as they did in the beginning
which
i have noticed is the same as those policies folks get
from their work related policies

now all this is for folks who qualify for tax credits
if you dont qualify then you really pay a lot for insuance
well over $15000 a year for this family of four

i dont see any fixing going on of all of this
getting rid of it without replacing it with a more workable system
will leave a lot of you without coverage
due to
the costs
the available only of bad policies
the preexisting clause that will affect most of you

for now i am safe from all of this
since i have medicare and medicare supplement
but even that is climbing in costs
i can afford that
many retired folks cant

the solution
a complete revamping of our healthcare system
in a bipartisan way so it can withstand the changes
of who is in control in congress at a moment in time
well
i just dont see that happening

i guess what i am saying
is
there may not really be a solution
since too many powerful influences will come into play
if a change is proposed

it would definitely suck to be a small business person trying
to make it so you are protected from a medical expense disaster

as i have said before
its our fault if this happens
since
we elect those folks who wont change things up for the better

the organicgreen doctor

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