From the mailbag: No Choice Health Insurance

“Hello, my family and I are looking into health insurance assistance. One of our concerns about it is that we are looking for PPO plan and not HMO. We’ve been in touch with another agency and was informed that HMO plans were the only thing available. We were given this site to begin Healthsherpa.com and all we can see are HMO plans.”

I have no idea who or what a Healthsherpa is, but presume it eventually ends up at the 404Care.gov site. Where, in fact, the only options for our area are Molina, CareSource and Buckeye Health, all of which are HMO’s, and all of which are generally known as Medicaid “carriers.” And that means even narrower networks (fewer providers).

Oh goody.

But it gets better:

“My wife and I have 4 kids and our ages are 29, 26, 9, 6, 4, and 3. 3 girls and 1 boy.Our household income is 40,000 a year.”

I ran that through the handy subsidy calculator, which yielded – not surprisingly – this result:

“Results

“Based on the information you provided, you are likely eligible for Medicaid. Medicaid is a health coverage program run by states and the Federal government“

So not subsidy-eligible, either.

There are still choices, of course; we’ll see which (if any) they elect.