A little over two months ago I wrote an article about my experience with Obamacare. It wasn’t a glowing review. In a nutshell I said I wasn’t too happy with the process, but since things were going well with my doctor and I didn’t have to deal with the process too deeply, it was OK. This is the follow-up to my personal experience with Obamacare.

The system is severely broken for me.

The biggest thing to change my mind in the months since I wrote the initial article was in dealing a lot with the mechanics of Obamacare and understanding the extent to which people could expect help in navigating the system.

Soon after I wrote the article I got a call from my doctor’s office directing me to an optometrist. I made the call thinking I would have to wait a month for an appointment. Nope, the earliest they had available was in two months! (Note: I had the appointment on the 12th of December)

Soon it was time to renew or change my policy. I had to call healthcare.gov because I had gotten locked out of my account when they changed the password in April. The main reason for needing to get on was the address on file was my old address, not my new one, and the only way my insurance company would change the address on their end was for it to be changed on the healthcare.gov side.

Can you see how this is starting to look like a bureaucratic nightmare?

I got through by phone very quickly but was told by the nice operator that I had to verify EXACTLY the address information they had on file before they could proceed in unlocking the account. I didn’t have my old address in hand so I did it by memory. It was wrong. I was given no clue as to what part of it was wrong, just that it was wrong after I gave two tries at it. I hung up, found the address (I was off by a digit on the street address) and I called again. It was five minutes after I hung up, but now I had to wait 10 minutes for the next available operator. I calmed down, got someone, gave the right address and they reset the password so I could access the account.

Imagine my surprise and confusion when I changed the password, went to my contact information page and saw my new address listed! I hadn’t given the operator this information. I checked in other areas of the account to see if my old address was listed and it wasn’t. I know that in January I went into the account and changed my address to the new one. That’s why I was confused when mail from my insurance company continued going to the old address. When I made the change on their end I kept getting emails back about the healthcare.gov discrepancy on my address. So there I was staring at my new address in my account, but I had to use my old address to get in! I started to make a call to try to get thing corrected but when I heard that the wait time was 45 minutes (after hanging up 10 minutes earlier) I decided not to worry about it.

I tried to see if there would be a change to the insurance plan I had. Well it turned out my insurance company discontinued the plan I had and the one that was similar would be $60 more a month! That company didn’t have a good inexpensive plan (the closest plan which was a bronze not silver plan was the same amount I was paying but with a $6000 deductible as opposed to the $1500 I had). I found a very basic bronze plan for $125 from another company, but through some research I saw my doctor wasn’t under that policy.

Basically, I could keep my same doctor either by making the same payment each month but have a huge deductible, or I could pay $60 more a month and have the same deductible. I saw that the clinic where I saw my doctor had a healthcare.gov personal help service and I decided to go down and see if there was some help that could be offered.

That was a mistake!

What I was told would be a 10 minute wait turned into 2 hours because the person ‘didn’t read the schedule correctly’ and the people on staff had no knowledge of computers, which had me question their skills at helping me on healthcare. After two log in attempts with my assigned helper, I told her healthcare.gov was overloaded with people accessing the site. I could tell this by the error message. She assured me since another group of people in the office were on the site, the site must be OK. (What?) After using two other browsers and having the head helper also try to log in, she declared the site must be busy but couldn’t understand why the other people were still in. (Maybe because they were logged in when I walked passed them to your office!)

As to my main question about keeping my doctor, her sage advice was to pay up to keep him. I wasted most of my day off navigating the bureaucratic sludge of Obamacare for nothing. I had talked to a lot of people last year before signing up for care and good many of them said it was better for them to take the financial hit of not having insurance rather than pay for something they wouldn’t use. A responded a lot using the talking points put out by the government but going through the junk I did that day I really questioned myself.

I had seen the doctor a total of three times. I blame part of that on myself for taking too long in moving forward to see the doctor. When we sat down initially I laid out every issue I knew I needed checked out. All he did was to give me a prescription for some pills. After telling him the family medical history I had no tests for those. The only thing I saw, or at the time was about to see, outside of his was an optometrist that was going to take months to see.

As soon as I got back from the clinic I signed up for the cheapest plan I could find. I didn’t care about the deductible because up to this point I was paying out of pocket for everything anyway. There was no discount for the medication, definitely not one for the test strips. A few weeks later I contacted a pharmacist acquaintance in Tijuana. I told her the medication I was taking and asked what the price would be for them. A few days later when I got the numbers back I was in shock. What I paid for a month’s supply of the two sets of pills, one for diabetes and the other for high blood pressure, would pay for 3 month supply of the same medication. I had to let that run through my head for a bit. Look, I know intellectually the reasons for having health insurance. I’m one of the people insurance is supposed to help but at every turn I see myself dumping money into a system where I don’t see a clear benefit.

On the news I see pundits and experts pull out charts showing how the average American will pay $90 in health care costs or less. My insurance is $190 a month, plus every visit to my current doctor is $40 and the medication he prescribed is $38 for a month’s supply. If I didn’t know better from experience, I would have to shell out another $60 every two weeks for tests strips. I’m well aware I’m at the early and manageable stage of diabetes. If I don’t take care of myself those costs would be astronomical. Maybe, in the long run, the cost will balance itself out but right now, looking at the numbers, it’s hard for me to see the benefit.

Oh, about the optometrist. Just like my doctor he was very nice, very polite. The staff was nice and pleasant. At the end of the examination, after handing over the less than useless insurance card, I have to pay $40 for the exam and $45 for the glasses prescription. When I go to the eye glass center in the same building, where I am told the glasses ‘will probably cost less. I’m told the glasses will be $300 and the frames start at $100. Hell no I didn’t get the glasses. In the exam I was told my eyes were OK, I just had problems distant objects. At $400, I’ll stay fuzzy.

This is the part where I kind of lost it on Obamacare. I talked with a few co-workers and I told them the story about the eye doctor. I should have thought about doing this at the time, but they told me about a place I had heard about many times through commercials. They could have done the exam and gotten glasses for me for less than $100. If I went the Walmart route it could have been the same or less.

I’m willing to give benefit and say maybe in 10 years from now Obamacare would have worked out all the growing pains and will be a fine service, something looked up to like Social Security. Right now, for me, the program is a mess. I can’t keep the doctor I’m used to, unless I want to pay for the privilege. I’m paying a lot out for things and paying for my card. I’m paying for things offered by medical professional that are jacked up in price. Doing research on my own I’m finding alternatives that save quite a bit of money.

If the experience from the healthcare.gov exchange is any indication, I feel sorry for people getting advice from them. I could try to be understanding and say they are well meaning in their information but if they are giving bad advice, if the system is so messed up that addresses are cross referenced, how can someone follow their advice and hope that it is correct?

I don’t think people have the time or effort to do the research to find cost effective alternatives. If it wasn’t for the constant reminders, I probably would have let my old plan roll over, which in all likelihood would have placed me in a much more expensive plan. Because of last years’ experience I know next year I’m finding a doctor right away and demanding the tests I know I need. Just like the tests strips, I have a backup plan to get affordable medication. Right now Obamacare is an epic fail.