Skip to footer

Obamacare 101: Seven ways you can sign up, despite Web woes

On Oct. 21, President Obama acknowledged the technical problems with the Obamacare website. Although he talked about the importance of fixing it, he also emphasized that Americans have other ways of signing up for insurance. Here are seven options you may want to know about.

5. Use an independent calculator tool

This isn’t a way to sign up for insurance, but it is an efficient way to get a ballpark estimate of what your options will be on an exchange. Unlike the official HealthCare.gov website, you don’t need to open an account or enter private information such as your name or Social Security number on this calculator, provided by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

Enter basic information about your household (number of people, income), and you can get a sense of what subsidy you might qualify for, if any, and what the premiums are likely to be for plans labeled bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. Those labels refer to pricing options, which vary by monthly premium and by the deductibles you’d need to pay out-of-pocket as health services are used. (Some people will be eligible to have another Obamacare choice – so-called catastrophic insurance – instead of a plan from the menu of metallic labels.)

The HealthCare.gov website offers the link to the Kaiser calculator, but emphasizes that what you’ll see will be guideline figures, not definitive numbers on what you’ll owe. Still, it’s a helpful tool for testing out options for yourself or family members.

5 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.