Not wanting to wait any longer for the health care web site to get its act together, I took the unprecedented step of calling Florida Blue (previously BCBS of Florida) directly to find out about my health care options. The lady that I spoke with was quite informative. We've seen post on here about oher grumbling that there deductibles are going to $5,000 under the ACA. This is what I found out:

The silver plan, the one most people are likely to choose does have a $5,000 deductible that applies to hospital care only. If you wind up in the hospital with heart surgery, your are going to get wacked with that deductible. But that is the only place it applies. Office visits do not go against the deductible. Everyone on the plan get three free office visits a year and then there is a $25 co-pay for visits to a general physician and $50 co-pay to a specialist.

Blood work is free. Incredibly ER visits have a $500 cap. That is real important to me because when my heart goes into SVT arythimia every five years I have always had a $3,000 ER bill. This is a good plan. It offers what most people need with essentially a catastrophic cap at $5,000.

I will save you the great info on the premium for another day. Let's just say, I was astonished.==============================

thing will be a monumental cluster#badword# for a long time, and that is from a person who supports Obama and ACA, conceptually anyway.  I have to say, I am disturbed and quite frankly angry that they bungled this thing so badly, and the sebelius interview only made me more angry.  To come on TV and say the POTUS didn't know there were issues with the website?  Really?  Surely that is not true, that the POTUS was unaware that the main enrollment vehicle for this HUGE initiative and cornerstone of his administration was functionally inoperable -surely he KNEW this ahead of time and they decided to go anyway, right?   Then Sebelius says they didn't push a few weeks to address the issues they knew were there (crashed with a few hundred people logging in during testing) b/c people have waited decades for affordable healthcare, and they couldn't wait any longer.  WTF?  What's a few more weeks to make sure that the #badword#ing thing works??  

I'm sorry, this is a HUGE deal.  I hope you continue to have a good experience, and I hope this does most of what it's supposed to do, but holy #badword# am I skeptical based on what I have seen so far.

BBG