Health Insurance!

So...after being declined individual coverage by a private health insurance company (one that used to offer me coverage under an employer-sponsored program), I started trying to track down what exact health insurance options exist in my state. More than once, I was very tempted just to pick up the phone and dial my way through the state government phone tree, to someone who could answer this question for me. But...alas, I am a Hillsdale college graduate, and damned if I was going to resort to calling the government for help, even on the matter of whether I was eligible for government help. Virtus tentamine gaudet, et. al.

There are many sites out there about health insurance, with much interesting and thorough information. But the problem is, most of it is just stuff you plain don't need. When you're standing out in the cold, going "Ok, so what on earth are my options now???", there's a very specific and essential list of things you need to know, and you DON'T want to have to sort through fifty thousand web pages to get it.

Thus, the following annotated bibliography is designed to aid anyone who might conceivably face a similar situation.

First, there's healthinsuranceinfo.net. Go here, select your state, and it will answer your questions in a direct and comprehensible way. It is the most user-friendly, layman-friendly site I've been able to find. It's arranged in a very intuitively accessible way. Any jargon is explained in plain English, without making you feel like you're a 3-year-old. Yes, some pages may not be updated with the latest information. Which is an important caveat. But the plusses of the site make it worth the while anyway, so much so that I'm listing it first on this list despite that drawback. (Even for Virginia, which was last updated in 2007, it presents the best explanation of every option except the recently created federal stopgap high risk pool).

To make sure you haven't missed any recent updates, you should cross-reference with the the individual state pages on healthinsurance.org. They are the place that I found the link to the healthinsuranceinfo.org site, and they are the most straightforward of the other sites I looked at. (Well, at least the info pages. I can't vouch for the lobbyist pages).

For information about the federal high-risk pool, this page at healthcare.gov is the best place to look.

healthcare.gov also has the a handy questionnaire you can take, which will spit out some options available to you. It's quick and incomplete, though -- for Virginia, it doesn't even mention that there's an "insurer of last resort," which is a BIG DEAL. I also ran into broken links when I tried to access a page about resources available to me.

Finally, if you want some pretty charts, this page by the Kaiser Foundation isn't bad. It was the thing that first clued me in to the fact that Virginia had this "insurer of last resort" option, though it took quite a bit more searching to figure out exactly what that meant.

And as a postscript, since any post about healthcare has to have some half-baked opinion nowadays, I suppose I should add my first conclusively solid opinion about the whole mess (that I hope even the most libertarian small government people might be able to agree with): If someone is trying to be responsible and buy health insurance, by golly there should be a way for them to at least buy basic catastrophic coverage health insurance. :(