No one is 100 percent sure if your insurance premiums will go up or down, if your employer will stop paying for health care and instead pay the penalty, or if your doctor will stop taking insurance altogether. One thing we do know: there are no death panels. So rest easy.
Here’s how the Affordable Care Act might affect you, if…
… you are uninsured.
First of all, Texas has declined—or stood up for states’ rights and adamantly refused, depending on your political views—to establish a state-based health insurance marketplace. So that means 675,000 uninsured Dallas County residents will be served by the federal Health Insurance Marketplace instead. Starting October 1, the uninsured can go online and research coverage options, and enrollment will begin January 1, 2014. Many first-time insurance buyers who earn between roughly $12,000 and $46,000 will be eligible for some type of federal subsidy.
To aid the underinformed, local initiatives have popped up across the state: the Texas Organizing Project, Blue Cross Blue Shield’s Be Covered Texas, and Enroll America, a federal group with a Texas office. Each group is tasked with canvassing and organizing community meetings where Texans can get more information.
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“I think the most important thing is that people should ask who in their lives needs to know about this,” says Mimi Garcia, head of Enroll America’s Texas office. “If you yourself have insurance, you know somebody that doesn’t. We want everybody to be talking about this.”
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has also met with local and state leaders on multiple trips to Texas, and, in August, the United Way of Metropolitan Tarrant County was awarded nearly $6 million by HHS to help Texans navigate the health insurance exchanges.
“We’re moving beyond the partisan discussion and focusing on—with the fourth-most uninsured county in the United States—what we can do to lower that number,” says Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins.
Covering the uninsured isn’t just a medical issue; it’s also an economic one. The Dallas hospital district, anchored by Parkland Memorial, provides $562 million in unreimbursed care annually, a figure that is offset, but not eliminated by, the $425 million in property tax that funnels to the district.
Date: September 17, 2013