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The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye

Last updated on: December 13, 2023 at 2:14 pm by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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The Long Goodbye 2023-12-13T14:14:29-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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Today, with enrollment cards in hand for employer-provided health insurance, I pushed the button to cancel the Affordable Care Act insurance my family went on in 2013. (You can read a bit more about the story behind that here and here, in posts I wrote in 2017.)

The overlap between the chattering classes and the people who actually receive government benefits is pretty small (in the first post linked above there’s the story of how, when I applied for Medicaid in 2013, the highest educational level the form would allow for was a BA – not the Ph.D. I actually have.) Thus, I’ve always felt I stood in a fairly unique spot as someone who both got benefits and could chatter about it. Here’s ten things I feel like chattering about right now.

I am immeasurably grateful that the ACA enabled me and my preexisting condition to have insurance at all the past ten years – a $14,000 deductible, and insurer-pay rather than cash-pay rates, are better than nothing at all.
I do look forward to not having to pay $600 a month for asthma drugs, though. We (this is governmental we, not my family we) didn’t do anything about prices. We needed to do something about prices.
I also look forward to having someone else buy my eyeglasses and pay for my dental work. Good grief, that stuff is expensive. Like I said, we needed to do something about prices.
People often talk about benefits being “handed out.” No one is handing anything. You have to jump through immeasurable hoops to get them. (This is apparently the post where I say “immeasurable” a lot. And spell-check it every single time.)
Most of the inefficiencies of the hoops are the result of bureaucratic inertia, not a devious plot.
While we’re on bureaucratic inertia, why are the websites connected to all levels of government (federal, state, county, etc.) consistently the poorest-designed from an user experience standpoint? It took me several months to figure out how to use the website to quit the benefits.
Imagine how much we could get done during the time we all spend on hold on the phone for reasons related to health insurance.
RIP Medical Debt is doing kingdom work. I have no idea their actual religious position, but they’re going to end up among the sheep in Matthew 25. I have been and will be paying it forward to them.
Poor health is often genetic or systemic and none of us are going to get anywhere blaming anyone else for poor health caused solely by bad moral choices. If you haven’t had a brush with your own mortality yet, trust me, you will. In the meantime, go read John 9.
When I pushed the button, I cried. I’m not sure why.

Photo by Adhy Savala on Unsplash

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