Woman Poster Child Was Furious With Obamacare. Now Says "Blessing In Disguise"

Dianne Barrette

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-healthplans-20131030,0,5590179.story#axzz2joOTEGIi

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A week ago, Dianne Barrette was the poster child for the harms of health reform. Barrette is a 56-year-old Floridian who found she wouldn't be able to keep her health insurance after Obamacare. From the the transcript:

Last month, [Barrette] received a letter from Blue Cross/Blue Shield informing her as of January 2014, she would lose her current plan. Barrette pays $54 a month. The new plan she’s being offered would run $591 a month, ten times more than what she currently pays. “What I have right now is what I’m happy with, and I just want to know why I can’t keep what I have. Why do I have to be forced into something else?”

Barrette's wrenching story quickly made Fox News, and then ricocheted through the rest of the media. Then the Washington Post's Erik Wemple called Barrette and got the details on her health-care plan.

Her current health insurance plan, she says, doesn’t cover “extended hospital stays; it’s not designed for that,” says Barrette. Well, does it cover any hospitalization? “Outpatient only,” responds Barrette. Nor does it cover ambulance service and some prenatal care. On the other hand, says Barrette, it does cover “most of my generic drugs that I need” and there’s a $50 co-pay for doctors’ appointments. A middling hospital stay could well have bankrupted Barrette under her current insurance.

Then the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn called Barrette and walked through the subsidies she'd qualify for and the precise plans she might be able to get. Her response? "I would jump at it," she told Cohn. "With my age, things can happen. I don’t want to have bills that could make me bankrupt. I don’t want to lose my house."

In the space of about a week, in other words, Barrette went from Obamacare victim to Obamacare beneficiary."Maybe," she said abut Obamacare, "it’s a blessing in disguise."

Call this the fog of health reform: We're in a period right now where the information coming out about the insurance people will get under Obamacare is often incomplete, wrong, or misleading. This is true for a few reasons