#ObamaCare Forced Mom Into Medicaid

Now this is just downright sad.

From Nicole Hopkins, at WSJ:

My mother is not one to seek attention by complaining, so her recent woeful Facebook post caught my eye: "The poor get poorer." It diverged from the more customary stream of inspirational quotes, recipes and snapshots from her tiny cottage in Pierce County, Wash.

The post continued: "I just received a notice: 'In order to comply with the new healthcare law, your current health plan will be discontinued on December 31, 2013.' Currently my premium is $276 and it is a stretch for me to cover. The new plan . . . are you ready . . . projected new rate $415.20. Now I can't afford health insurance."

The unaffordable ObamaCare-compliant plan that her insurer offered in a Sept. 26 letter is not what makes my mother's story noteworthy. Countless individually insured Americans have received such letters; many are seeing more radical increases in premiums and deductibles.

But most of these people are still being offered the chance to choose what health-care insurance they will receive, or to opt out before they are automatically enrolled in a state program. Not so my mother, Charlene Hopkins, as I soon discovered when I called after seeing her Facebook post.

Since she couldn't afford the new plan offered by her insurer, she told me she was eager to explore her new choices under the Affordable Care Act. Washington Healthplanfinder is one of the better health-exchange sites, and she was actually able to log on. She entered her personal and financial data. With efficiency uncommon to the ObamaCare process, the site quickly presented her with a health-care option.

That is not a typo: There was just one option—at the very affordable monthly rate of zero. The exchange had determined that my mother was not eligible to choose to pay for a plan, and so she was slated immediately for Medicaid. She couldn't believe it was true and held off completing the application.

"How has it come to this?" she asked in one of our several talks over the past few weeks about what was happening. When she was a working mother and I was young, she easily carried health insurance for our whole family. "How have I fallen this far?"

In 2011, she had to give up her real-estate license; as a newer agent, she did not stand to earn enough in the tough market to justify the fees to renew. She has since managed to eke out a living as a substitute para-educator in the Central Kitsap School District. "I'm not on the couch, watching TV," she said. "I'm out trying to find more work every day."

Unable to secure employer-sponsored health care, she had, until this fall, chosen to pay $276 a month for bare-bones catastrophic coverage. "I think that we should be able to take care of ourselves and to earn enough money to pay for basics, and health insurance is one of them," she told me. For two years she had paid out of pocket for that plan, but now she is being told that the plan isn't good enough for her.

The Sept. 26 letter from my mother's insurer promised that the more expensive plan "conforms with the new health care law"—by covering maternity needs, newborn wellness and pediatric dental care. My mother asked: "Do I need maternity care at 52?" In addition to requiring her to pay an extra $1,677 annually, the plan would have increased her deductible by $1,500.

But she had at least been presented with an option that she could turn down, unlike on the state exchange...

Continue reading.

Leftists will say they're making the woman better off. But she liked her plan, because it preserved her dignity. ObamaCare robbed her of it. We're all caught in the maw of the vicious Democrat healthcare tyranny. Only complete repeal --- and the utter decimation of the menacing Democrat Party --- will begin to turn things around, and restore some dignity.