When you consider everything that “surprised” consumers about Obamacare, and our individual health insurance policies, it’s important to consider how we were “surprised,” or “tricked,” or “misled,” about the PPACA to avoid further trickery in the future.
For the most part, aside from the Supreme Court ruling about Medicaid expansion and whether the individual mandate was a tax or a penalty, news coverage of Obamacare that included its scammier elements, the cover-up (defined here as it is in freedictionary.com as “to hide from view or knowledge) really was not that newsworthy until the end of the year, 2013 even though PPACA has been law since 2010.
Obamacare is full of provisions people claim they “didn’t know about,” as if they were secret. But how could they have been secret if they were there in black and white the whole time? In my opinion, it’s because the length of and confusion presented in reading the law, in combination with a misplaced reliance that we were getting accurate descriptions of the law amounted to hiding what the law is in plain sight.
As the facts of Obamacare became more familiar to people at the end of 2013 in preparation for health insurance provisions becoming effective in 2014, we started hearing about how people’s trust in the President was floundering. We realized that in spite of all the talking the President had done that he had OMITTED key provisions of the law that promise negative impact on both the physical and financial health of many citizens. In other words, we had at best been told only the good things about the law. We’d been scammed.
Finally we realized that this was about passing healthcare reform for the sake of the President’s legacy, not to address the healthcare crisis as we knew it nor the affordability issue impliedly covered by the law’s name.
But the provisions of Obamacare were discoverable by us. In accordance with a White House policy that promises “transparency,” we were FLOODED with information about Obamacare and after 2010 could read the law in any number of places so we were slow to realize that the volume and complexity of material we could see in combination with the selective discussion of the popular features of the law only actually created a cover-up, again, “to hide from view or knowledge.”
One of the many lessons of Obamacare is that transparency can be used as a tool in aiding with a cover-up when the sheer volume of information presented and the language used to present it creates the likelihood that people will not understand and will have to rely on others to interpret what they’re reading.
This is a critical for us as consumers with health insurance policies. Obamacare itself requires summaries of health insurance policies in the form of Summary of Benefits and Coverage. But it is important to note that NO summary governs what your health insurance policy is, only the policy itself governs that.
In terms of our changing practices, it’s imperative to incorporate calling your insurance company into your repertoire, finding out what they say, keeping a record of your communications and even sending a confirming email back to them mirroring what they said in order to avoid “surprises” of features of your health insurance policy that are in plain sight regarding your coverage.
