Working for healthcare? If my younger self could see me now

I have this memory from my early 20s of listening to older adults talk about needing to work, not to make money, but to maintain their health insurance until they would go on Medicare.

How sad I recall thinking, that the decision over whether you needed to keep a job would come down to something so basic as health insurance.

With the arrogance of youth, I thought, surely these people did something wrong, didn’t plan adequately or made some grievous error in their decision making.

Such a fate would never happen to me.

Flash forward 40 years and I am that guy, working for health insurance, and grateful to have recently found a job at the Mariposa Gazette.

To be honest, it was really a fortuitous convergence of events. I was looking for purpose and the Gazette offered health insurance.

For the last couple of years, my husband and I have been on Covered California, aka the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare.

During the seven long weeks of the federal government shutdown, Democrats held out saying they wanted to save the ACA, as Republicans talked about healthcare for illegal immigrants.

The politics of healthcare can make for strange bedfellows, as Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene joined Democrats, and called out her fellow Republicans for not having a plan to replace the ACA.

I wanted someone in the news media, the New York Times or the network evening news, to simply show how the cost of health insurance might increase for the average American if Republicans were allowed to gut the ACA.

I waited. And waited some more. I was puzzled because normally the press loves to do this kind of real impact consumer reporting, “This is what milk is costing you now!”

Occasionally I would hear a news reporter mutter something about rates that may go up by “hundreds of dollars,” then “thousands of dollars.” Recently, I heard someone actually say “costs could double.”

Double? If only I were so lucky.

Let me do what others have not. Let me get out the chalkboard and show you the math.

I retired three years ago after working 30 years in television. At 60, I had a small pension. My husband, 64, a former hospital administrator, also had a pension and began taking Social Security early. Our current income meant we didn’t qualify for Medi-Cal.

So we got a high-deductible plan through Covered California from Blue Shield that cost us $6,694 a year. Not cheap, but we could swing that.

On Nov. 1, Covered California sent a letter that informed us that the same high deductible, no-frills plan would now cost us $39,369 a year.

That is a 488 percent increase.

Double?

My husband and I have what could politely be termed “demographic challenges.” Both healthy our entire lives, we are approaching the age where medical issues and highers costs begin to emerge.

Blue Shield is just playing the numbers. At our age, we are an actuarial risk. And make no mistake, modern health insurance is in many ways like your local casino. The house always wins.

Is our 488 percent increase representative? I honestly don’t know.

But I know we are not the only ones in this tight spot.

There are 24 million Americans enrolled in the Affordable Care Act, 44 million if you consider ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

In 2025, there were two million Californians enrolled in Covered California, and 345,711 were new enrollees.

In Mariposa, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tulare counties, enrollment grew last year by 22 percent, one of the largest increases in the state.

How did the media miss this story?

For the last six weeks the federal government shutdown has been covered like a boxing match, with a nightly tally of who scored political points, who won each round, and which party would score the knockout punch.

The news coverage has been as pathetic as the politics.

It is frustrating to me, as a journalist for nearly 40 years, that the media was not able to wrap its head around the ACA issue and present coherent analysis that laid out the stakes.

I struggled with understanding exactly why. Do all these journalists have health insurance through their employer, so they don’t understand the ACA?

Perhaps the potential impact was unclear in September. But by October, and open enrollment, plenty of people were getting letters and recoiling with sticker shock.

It is instructive that what finally moved the ball in the government shutdown debate were SNAP benefits and delays in commercial air travel. Two stories that are, by comparison, easy to understand, cause and effect. People will go hungry and travelers won’t get to their destination.

The ACA invariably gets tangled in the weeds of those who fear socialized medicine, pray at the alter of free-markets or blindly hate anything attached to the Obama Administration.

Politicians and constituents alike can be counted on to moan about the growth of entitlements, while conveniently ignoring a sacred cow entitlement of their own, like Medicare and Social Security.

Or a tax code that increasingly looks like an entitlement program for the top 1 percent.

Ignored in the debate over the federal government shutdown, were real Americans with real choices to make during this open enrollment season. Do you pay through the nose for healthcare, or cross your fingers and go without?

If something terrible happens, cancer or a traumatic accident, will you be at the whim of GoFundMe?

Do you ditch that freelance gig or startup and go work for a traditional company with basic health insurance?

In my case, the Affordable Care Act saved my family. It allowed my husband and I to leave our jobs in Minnesota early and take care of my mother after the death of my father.

We are not alone on this front, either. Caregivers in America sacrifice $522 billion a year in lost income from reduced hours, missed promotions and people leaving the workforce. That figure also includes the loss of retirement savings and pensions.

I am willing to admit, there may be solid policy reasons to find something better than the ACA. I am open to that. I’m listening.

But to simply rip the rug out from under 24 million Americans who depend on the ACA seems unimaginably cruel. Maybe not quite as cruel as taking away food stamps, but it’s up there.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I found a new job, one that I love, in the nick of time and I was able to get off the ACA. Millions of Americans won’t have that choice.

If my younger self could see me now — working for healthcare — what would he say?

He would probably wonder the same thing I do: How the hell did I get in this mess?

Tom Lyden is a staff writer for the Mariposa Gazette and can be reached at tom@mariposagazette.com.