Hate Obama, Love Obamacare

I don't think Obamacare will help us. I don't want anything to do with it," Stephanie Recchi told me a week after the launch of HealthCare.gov on Oct. 1. "I hear a lot of bad things about it--that it doesn't cover pre-existing conditions and

it's too expensive," she added, referring to what she said were "television ads and some politicians talking on the news. Just a lot of talk that this is a bad law."

Recchi's interest in health insurance is anything but casual. Those who read TIME's special report in March on health care costs ("Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us") may recall that when Stephanie's husband Sean, then 42, was diagnosed with cancer a year earlier, the couple--who together were drawing about $3,500 a month from the small business they had just started in Lancaster, Ohio--had to borrow from her mother and max out their credit cards to try to save him.

MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston had told Stephanie that their insurance (for which they paid $469 a month) was virtually worthless. So the hospital demanded $83,900, in advance, just to develop a treatment plan for Sean and cover his first $13,702 transfusion, along with simple items like gauze pads at $77 per box and routine lab tests for which he was billed tens of thousands of dollars.

As I reported, Stephanie recalled that her husband was "sweating and shaking with chills and pains. He had a large mass in his chest that was ... growing. He was panicked." Nonetheless, Sean was held in a reception area and kept from seeing a doctor for about 90 minutes until the hospital confirmed that the Recchis' check had cleared.

All of which explains why despite the negative--and in this case, completely inaccurate--scuttlebutt she says she had heard about Obamacare, Stephanie Recchi visited HealthCare.gov repeatedly after it launched. But, she said, "I just never got anywhere ... It kept freezing or crashing."

That Obamacare crashed on Stephanie and Sean Recchi, of all people, amid a torrent of misinformation about what the law could or could not do for them, epitomizes the calamity of the failed launch. But what has happened to the Recchis and their health care options more recently might be emblematic of the law's potential.

The key provisions of Obamacare seem as if they were drafted by someone sitting next to Sean Recchi in that MD Anderson holding room. Under the law, insurance companies can no longer turn away people with pre-existing conditions or even take those conditions into account when determining what people like the Recchis pay for their coverage. When Stephanie logged on in October, she was shopping for a family facing the ultimate pre-existing condition--cancer. Although Sean is now in remission, he is regularly seeing doctors in Ohio and taking drugs costing hundreds of dollars a month.

Stephanie, Sean and their two children are also a perfect match for the demographic that Obamacare was designed to serve: a family of four earning less than $40,000 a year, unable to get insurance from an employer because the Recchis had just started their own business.

Another feature of Obamacare is those much heralded online insurance exchanges, meant to enable those without job-related coverage to log on and find an array of competing products, none of which would be allowed to have the bait-and-switch limits that had left Sean unprotected when he needed lifesaving care. (When he was diagnosed with cancer, Sean's policy limited his coverage to $2,000 a day in the hospital, which at MD Anderson barely covers an opening round of blood tests.) And all policies would be presented on the exchanges in plain English for easy comparison. Or, as President Obama often put it, buying health insurance would now be like going online to buy an airplane ticket.

Finally, people with incomes below 400% of the poverty line (up to about $94,000 for a family of four like the Recchis) would get subsidies from the government, so that it all would be more affordable. If they were at or below the poverty level, they would be enrolled in Medicaid for free.

The Recchis now know all that, and they're fully insured for 2014. But it took a while. When we spoke in October and Stephanie told me she didn't "think Obamacare will help us," I suggested that she might be mistaken and that if she was unable to get information from the then sputtering website she should consult an insurance broker. (Insurers pay the brokers' fees, not consumers.)

"When they came to my office, Stephanie told me right up front, 'I don't want any part of Obamacare,' " recalls health-insurance agent Barry Cohen. "These were clearly people who don't like the President. So I kind of let that slide and just asked them for basic information and told them we would go on the Ohio exchange"--which is actually the Ohio section of the federal Obamacare exchange--"and show them what's available."

What Stephanie soon discovered, she told me in mid-November, "was a godsend." The business that she and her husband had launched--which sells a product that enables consumers to store their DNA or that of family members for future genetic testing--had recently received investor interest after being featured on an episode of the television series CSI. So she estimated to Cohen that their income would be about $90,000 in 2014. But even at that level, her family of four would qualify for a subsidy under Obamacare.

The Recchis and their agent soon zeroed in on a plan with a $793 monthly premium that provided full coverage, though with a deductible of $12,000 for the entire family, meaning the Recchis would pay the first $12,000 in expenses. After the deductible was reached, there would be no co-payments for anything, including all drugs. However, the Obamacare subsidy, assuming a $90,000 income, brought their cost down to $566 a month. If their income was the same $40,000 Stephanie had estimated for 2013, the subsidy would increase and their premium would be just $17 a month.

"They had budgeted insurance at $1,200 for each of them for their new business," says Cohen. "That's $2,400 for the two of them, compared to $566, so they were thrilled ... They had seen all those stories on television, and because of their views about Obama, they believed what they wanted to believe--until they saw these policies and these numbers."

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