Ambetter is known to be horrible. Why on earth would you pick them when there are so many options? I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health

Ambetter is known to be horrible. Why on earth would you pick them when there are so many options? I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health care ($0 copays for almost everything) from "Sharp Health" and didn't even need to use the exchange to get the rate ($600/mo direct retail from Sharp). Kaiser is on the same order of magnitude. Hell, even straight up Blue Cross/Blue Shield is better than what you picked. Good grief. > The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month. Okay, okay, let's refresh your memory: My mother was widowed and had to buy health insurance at 60. She got lucky and could tap into the PA Teacher's Pension system for a mere $1,100 per month. She paid that for 5 years until Medicare. This was prior to Obmamacare. Where was her $650 plan? My wife was 35 and had sleep apnea and her cheapest plan that would even cover her was $3,500 per month with an enormous deductible. This was prior to Obamacare. 10+ million people couldn't get coverage. "Excision panels" worked hard to dump you off the rolls the moment you tried to use them. Okay THAT was the system before Obamacare. Remember now? What you are pining for was the old "indemnification" system that was due to the extremely strong labor unions. Unfortunately, that went away in the 80s due to the rise of the HMOs and the fact that everybody dumped on the labor unions. Many of us fought against that knowing that the HMOs were picking off the "profitable" people and were eventually going to to collapse the indemnification system--which is precisely what happened. And then the HMOs weren't so profitable once they got those patients and would dump them--which they did. And THAT was the situation before Obamacare.