Tag: Obamacare

What’s The Difference Between State, Federal, and Private Health Insurance Marketplaces?

While most people get their health insurance from their spouses, jobs, or school, self-employed or unemployed individuals have to rely on the health insurance marketplace to purchase a policy that suits their lifestyle and income. Government and privately-managed marketplaces provide an easy way for individuals to compare various quotes, review different plans without making phone calls, and find answers to multiple questions.

A health marketplace is a useful tool that serves small businesses, families, and individuals. Through this resource, you can enroll in a plan that suits your healthcare needs and detects valuable tax credits.

Public vs. private marketplaces

Either the federal government or state governments manage the public medical insurance marketplace, while private companies run private exchanges. While government exchanges are usually limited to qualified health plans (i.e. ACA-compliant plans), private exchanges have more flexibility to offer non-qualified plans that may be more cost-effective.

For example, compare healthcare.gov versus a private exchange like AHiX Marketplace. The former only offers ACA-compliant plans, while the latter offers all of those plans in addition to cheaper short-term or limited coverage plans. So if full coverage isn’t your primary concern and you’re mostly interested in saving money, you can find affordable health insurance at AHiX Marketplace and other private healthcare exchanges like it.

Private health marketplace

Private exchanges provide a wide variety of options, so you can receive valuable insight into different coverage types before committing to a plan. Using these private health marketplaces, you can find affordable policies with extensive coverage.

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NSA and the Federal Government Collect Everything they Can About Us; Are Our Medical Records Next?

The NSA and federal government spying dragnet has filled the news cycle and brought to light the government’s programs that spy on U.S. citizens. Effectively, the feds are collecting every American’s data, from emails, phone calls, Tweets, Facebook pages, Google search and whatever else they can get their hands on, which begs the question: If the government is freely collecting the data of every citizen of the United States – the FBI recently admitted to spying on American using drones on American soil – why them would the data collection stop with these communication methods? Why not continue the collection of data that’s gathered through our medical records through that’s being collected through several efforts, including the meaningful use program.

All of that aside, more information than we can fathom is going to be collected about each of us once Obamacare takes effect next year, which will be siphoned off through several agencies to ensure we’re vetted for the new national healthcare program.

I bring this up for a single purpose – we now know data is being collected about us, so what makes us think our health data won’t be collected and used against us in some manner, as  Pierluigi Stella so clearly outlines in the post – “How Will the NSA Info Gathering Affect Healthcare and Individuals’ Electronic Health Records” — for this site.

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