@calmom – you beat me to the punch – I was just checking ACA open enrollment dates for @Creekland and then saw your post.
I’m in NC – yes, we have the various tiers of ACA like everywhere else. Many are run by BlueCross. His current illness will not be a factor in what he pays (thank you ObamaCare! Sorry, couldn’t resist.) and since he’s young I am hopeful there will be affordable options. I agree he should get the insurance so he can get further checked out!
I just checked and if he voluntarily dropped coverage, he has to wait for the open enrollment period.
I’m definitely going to push for him getting something as soon as he can - even if we need to pay for it for a couple of years.
He changed jobs last Nov. His old job provided insurance. His new one did not. He opted to go without “because they were young and healthy and it was expensive” - both him and his wife. We mentioned the risk, but were brushed off.
At first his salary increased, but then his new company abruptly cut it in half. He likes his job, so stuck with it, though I know finances have to be tight. As I mentioned before, we paid for his ER visit/x-ray, etc, when the “free test” was non-existent upon his arrival, but his blood oxygen was 92 at the time causing them to want the x-ray and leading to the diagnosis of “lower respiratory infection” with the verbal statement of “probably Covid.”
Now, for me, it’s just trying to walk the fine line between interference with a lad who has always wanted to be independent and is now 28 vs my motherly instincts of wanting to just take over and do what I think needs to be done.
Hopefully his brush with needing health care will be on my side. Nov 1st is coming up.
Meanwhile, I continue to hope it’s just a slow recovery and not anything permanent.
Ugh, I’ve given up on trying to convince my middle kid to keep health insurance. At least Lebanon, where he is now, made him buy a policy just to enter the country. But I don’t think he will be required to renew it. He knows we won’t help financially if he suffers a medical crisis and is not covered.
If he doesn’t have a ton of income he’d be eligible for premium subsidies and maybe cost-sharing subsidies as well.
When we paid for gap health insurance for one of our adult children, I said his grandparents had done the same for us, and it was a great favor to me for my peace of mind, and potentially much less costly for all of us in the long run. He could pay us back or pay it forward to the next generation.
Good luck
Depending on your finances and his, and the range of options & policies on the exchange, another option as a parental gift/subsidy would be for him to opt for a lower-premium HSA account, and for the parents to fully fund the HSA account for the first year. This leaves him with a higher deductable but lower premiums, and is a good way to sock away money for the future – since the HSA is a tax-sheltered account. Then the HSA funds are available for copays or deductables, but if not spent they remain in an interest bearing & accumulating fund.
Note that fees and investment options for individual HSA accounts vary.
https://investorjunkie.com/alternative-investments/best-hsa-accounts/
Having just talked with my guy, he is totally open to getting health insurance when the market opens for it. He was thinking the beginning of the year. I told him it’s Nov 1st?
He also went on a 5 mile hike today telling me it was cooler out and they went much slower than normal so he thought it might be ok. Half way through he was wondering if he should be doing it, but at that point, he still had to get back so he finished.
It might have helped assure him it’s worth insurance, so there’s that. I’d love to know what’s going on now TBH and I’m hopeful he’s still improving vs our last phone call since he even attempted 5 miles.
@Creekland – I believe Enrollment opens on Nov 1st and may close as early as early December, but the effective date of coverage is Jan 1st. Initial enrollment may take a while, so it is best for him to enroll as soon as possible, as he made need to upload documentation.
@ucbalumnus – Fidelity offers a free HSA account. I do not know if you have to be a Fidelity account holder, but no fee to open and no ongoing management fees.
Massive genetic study shows coronavirus mutating and potentially evolving amid rapid U.S. spread
The largest U.S. genetic study of the virus, conducted in Houston, shows one viral strain outdistancing all of its competitors, and many potentially important mutations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/09/23/houston-coronavirus-mutations/
In our state, if you lose health insurance due to losing a job, you don’t have to wait for open enrollment. In my state, you have insurance the day you apply, pending review of course. Going to a hospital financial counseling office makes it instant. In my state (Medicaid expansion state) if you don’t have income or have low income, you get Medicaid, based on a snapshot of income (you show pay stubs or proof of losing job). My kids have done Medicaid to cover gaps between college and job. The coverage was fine.
If only it worked like this in all states.
The ACA mandate, with its ineffective fines, tried to enforce the social responsibility to pay into the system when healthy, so that the system would be there when you or others get sick. The mandate was ruled illegal. Praying for a system of affordable health insurance. But people have to buy in for it to work.
Actually, the mandate was ruled legal in the Supreme Court as a tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v._Sebelius . But the tax was later set to zero, so now there is a lawsuit headed to the Supreme Court about that: https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/explaining-california-v-texas-a-guide-to-the-case-challenging-the-aca/
Obviously, with the mandate tax as low as it was originally and zero recently, it may not itself have been much incentive for healthy people to buy in if they were not in the subsidy range of income. Of course, some did because of the risk of potentially scary medical bills if they did not (rather than hoping to hold out until the next open enrollment period if they get an expensive sickness).
Medical care in the US is expensive enough now that the cost of it is likely to be painful for many no matter how it is funded (by individual self-pay, individual insurance plans, employer plans, or government plans funded by taxes).
That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing it. Glad it’s not evolving to be more deadly, but with it looking similar to the flu with mutations, it could definitely make an effective vaccine difficult to come up with.
Press release from the researchers:
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/newsroom/houston-methodist-researchers-find-telling-clues-in-virus-genes-from-covid-19-patients/
Preprint paper (not yet peer reviewed):
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.072652v2
^ And our local paper printed an article on that research, but with the headline “Massive New Study Finds Mask-Wearing, Social Distancing Could Have Made COVID-19 More Contagious.” ugh
Needless to say, the massive new study did not find mask-wearing and social distancing could have made COVID-19 more contagious. Headline writers should, perhaps, read the articles they are writing headlines for.
The first thing to note about the Houston study is, they analyzed infections in Houston during the month of March. Their article had nothing to say about mask-wearing, which in any event was not common in March in the United States. They discovered a mutation that perhaps makes covid more contagious. Presumably, if this mutation does make covid more contagious, it had already become more contagious on April 1st; we have no evidence that it got even more contagious after that.
In general, over time, viruses mutate to be more contagious and less deadly.
The evolutionary forces favor that – because the healthier the host, the more opportunities for the virus to spread & multiply. From the perspective of the virus, an asymptomatic carrier is their dream host.
So the mutation has apparently not affected severity, testing accuracy or response to remesdivir. I read somewhere that it also didn’t affect vaccine effectiveness, but cannot find the article.
As for masks, I also read that masks may be providing immunity because low dose exposure to the virus (low dose due to mask-wearing) may mean more people get asymptomatic or mild disease but acquire some amount of immunity. This was an interesting idea that has cropped up from time to time and would argue against hiding in our homes-as long as we have masks on!
We don’t really know the situation with the developmental vaccines and the genetic drift of the virus. People should be anticipating that should a vaccine be approved, it will be necessary to get it every year. So more similar to flu, than measles, just to take two examples.
Yes, this has been in the news and if true, tells us that many masks don’t necessarily protect the wearer. Meaning, at-risk people (a significant proportion of the US populace) should still be staying at home, and wear N95 masks when they do go out.