My hellacious health care nightmare -- Obamacare has ruined me

[pnwmom]

185. LOL. I'm not a physician. But I helped my son pick a plan on the exchange,

and so I do know how it works. (I also helped someone else get set up on Medicaid.)

If you lose your job you have a choice between paying for a COBRA plan or going on the exchange. Losing your job qualifies you for the exchange -- you don't have to "be at a certain level of poverty for some period of time." The COBRA plans are usually expensive but a lot of people choose them because they're familiar. Unfortunately, if you take a COBRA plan and then wish you had a subsidized exchange policy, you have to wait for the next enrollment period. That appears to be what happened to the OP.

Yes, there can be long waits to get through on the phone lines, if you don't want to handle things online. My son had good luck late at night. I would have stayed on the phone as long as necessary if I were you. I hope you can get through without insurance as long as you need to.

There is a problem with a shortage of primary care doctors now, but that isn't Obamacare's fault. It would be just as much of a problem if we had Medicare for all. We need to take measures to encourage more doctors to choose primary care rather than more lucrative specialties.