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Video: Catholic Health Association offers
help in getting citizens enrolled
Carrie Feibel, KUHF Public Radio
Healthcare advocates across Texas are scrambling this summer to get ready for a crucial deadline embedded in Obamacare: October 1. That’s the day uninsured Texans can start enrolling in health plans subsidized by the federal government. But will they? It could require a massive outreach effort.
It’s true that Obamacare requires almost everyone to get health coverage. That’s the individual mandate, and it starts January 1. Lots of people have heard about that.
But many of them don’t know that the law will help them get that coverage through so-called insurance marketplaces. Mimi Garcia is director of Enroll Texas, a nonprofit, non-partisan campaign to help Texans learn how to get coverage.
(Enroll America)
“We’re starting this summer because over 78 percent of all uninsured have no idea about these marketplaces.”
The marketplaces offer subsidies to help pay for the insurance plans, depending on your income. Even a family of four with an income as high as $94,000 a year will be eligible for a subsidy. To apply, people will go to an online website, choose from a menu of health plans, and sign up. That starts October 1.
But it could be a hard sell. Steven Vargas is a community health worker with the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, in Houston’s East End.
“Now there’s going to be premiums and co-pays that go along with that too, and (we) know that that’s going to be a deterrent for some folks, thinking ‘I’ve never had to fork out any money before, I don’t intend to fork out any money.’ But we have to also make them aware that the cost is going to be subsidized, depending on your income.”
There are also complications to explain.
Strangely enough, the poorest of the poor are not eligible for any subsidy. That’s because the poorest adults were supposed to get their insurance through Medicaid, but Texas officials decided not to offer that option, at least for now.
And undocumented immigrants are also not allowed to use the marketplaces. Both groups will have to continue to rely on emergency rooms and safety-net clinics.[…]
Read & listen to the rest of this story at KUHF Public Radio
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