Great fucking article on the ACA from Consumer Reports (not a liberal mouthpiece by anyone’s imagination)…

consumerreports.org

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Junk health insurance
Stingy plans may be worse than none at all
Consumer Reports magazine: March 2012
Legal but inadequate | Insurance that is not | Are there alternatives? | Avoid pitfalls when buying insurance on your own | 8 signs the plan you are pitched might be junk | Largest mini-med sellers

It might seem to be health insurance, if you don’t look too closely, and most people don’t. The premiums are surprisingly affordable. And so millions of unemployed people, service industry workers, and those taken in by fast-talking telemarketers sign up. They may think they’re insured—until they have a medical problem and find out that their coverage is as skimpy as a hospital gown.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to usher in a new era of consumer-friendly health care. For instance, insurers are no longer allowed to put outrageously low limits on the amount they pay out for medical care in a year or lifetime.

While millions of Americans have benefited from that and other reforms, many are still prey to the kind of skimpy “junk” plans the new law was designed to eliminate. Some plans, known as mini-meds, are operated by employers and brand-name insurance companies with special dispensation from the federal government. Others, such as health discount cards and fixed benefit indemnity plans, from companies you’ve probably never heard of, are so meager that regulators don’t consider them to be health insurance at all—though that’s frequently not clear to consumers. And some of the companies operate one step ahead of the law.
Legal but inadequate
Surgery delayed
Judith Goss put off cancer surgery while she searched for a way to pay for it.

Judith Goss, 48, of Macomb, Mich., believed that the Cigna plan she obtained through her job at the Talbots retail chain was “some type of insurance that would cover something.” When the store she worked at closed in January 2011, she even paid $65 a month to keep the coverage through COBRA.

“I was aware that it wasn’t a great plan, but I wasn’t concerned because I wasn’t sick,” she says. But in July 2011 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at which point the policy’s annual limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization became a huge problem. Facing a $30,000 hospital bill, she delayed treatment. “Finally my surgeon said, ‘Judy, you can’t wait anymore.’ While I was waiting my tumor became larger. It was 3 centimeters when they found it and 9 centimeters when they took it out.” After a double mastectomy, radiation treatments, and reconstructive surgery, Goss is taking the drug tamoxifen to prevent recurrence.