Locals enroll in Obamacare

When Andy Wallace left his job in December of 2011, he could have chosen to pay out of pocket in order to keep the health insurance his employer was providing.

But Wallace would have had to pay the full $600 a month to keep it. Instead, he chose to go without coverage.

“I didn’t want to pay more than my mortgage for health care,” he said. 

About 200 members of the community, volunteers (such as Wallace), elected officials and health care advocates gathered indoors at Heinz Field on Thursday to speak with experts about enrolling in the Health Insurance Marketplace. The Health Insurance Marketplace is a website that residents of Pennsylvania and more than 30 other states have been able to use since Oct. 1 to register for health insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Starting at 4 p.m., 15 certified application counselors answered questions about eligibility, distributed literature and helped individuals register in the marketplace.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who spoke at the event, said that in the Pittsburgh region alone, there are 188,000 people who do not have health insurance. In the state of Pennsylvania, there are 1.2 million.

“It’s a lot of us,” he said. “It’s people who go to work every single day and don’t have health care.”

Fitzgerald said that these people will now be eligible for coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius spoke at the event. Sebelius said that even though her department has received a large number of complaints from citizens that they were unable to complete registration on the site, she was optimistic.

“Believe me, we’ve had some early glitches,” she said. “But it’s getting better every day.”

Mike Murphy, the president of Community College of Allegheny County, also spoke at the event and praised the Affordable Care Act for allowing Americans under the age of 26 to be eligible for coverage under their parents’ insurance plans.

Dan Rooney, the former U.S. ambassador to Ireland and current chairman of the Steelers, agreed with Murphy, remarking that he has nine children. 

“I was fortunate,” he said. “But there are many people in this community who aren’t as fortunate and who aren’t able to help [their children].”

Other politicians and elected officials, including Pennsylvania representatives Erin Molchany, D-Mt. Washington, and Dan Frankel, D-Squirrel Hill, were also present.

Under the Affordable Care Act, those who do not have health insurance after Jan. 1, 2014, could be subject to penalties.

When Wallace, 34, of Dormont, Pa., left the tech company that he worked for until December 2011, he had the option of remaining on his employer’s health plan under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. 

The act, also known as COBRA, allows employees who leave companies to stay on their employers’ plans for a limited amount of time. The former employee has to cover the whole cost of the plan, rather than sharing the costs with the employer.

Wallace’s girlfriend, 29-year-old Stephany Conard, was also volunteering Thursday afternoon and registered on the marketplace when Wallace did in order to find more affordable coverage.

She has been on COBRA ever since she was laid off from her job at a real estate appraisal company in September.

Although her health insurance only cost her about $120 a month while she was working, about a quarter of her unemployment benefits go toward paying for health insurance. 

“I’m under 30,” said Conard, who graduated from Pitt in 2007. “I don’t smoke. I have no pre-existing condition. And still I’m paying $400 a month for COBRA.”

Wallace, who earns about $70,000 a year as a self-employed IT consultant, falls above the cut-off for government subsidies to help pay his premium, which is set at 400 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $45,000.

He said that he still wanted to know the options for coverage under the new legislation, since he currently has no health insurance.

Wallace’s and Conard’s applications on the marketplace are currently pending, and they are not sure what the plans that are available to them though the Affordable Care Act will cost. They said that a certified application counselor told them it could take about a week before the site processed their applications.

Wallace said that when he registered on the marketplace, he occasionally had to refresh the page to get the site to load correctly so that he could complete the application. The whole process took him about 10 to 15 minutes.

Joanne Grossi, the regional director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the area that includes the state of Pennsylvania, said members of the public have complained about difficulties they’ve encountered in registering, but the department is working around the clock to fix the glitches. 

Grossi was not sure how many people registered at the event, but as of Saturday, the website had more than 8 million visitors.

She said that the federal government is working to increase the number of servers available.

“It was literally five times as many people as we thought [we were going to have] who logged onto the site,” Grossi said. “That was part of the problem.”