Tax season is stressful enough. But if you’re like countless miserable Americans trapped in the ObamaCare 1095-A abyss, it’s hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health-insurance-exchange tax forms make the website fiasco look like a flawless product launch.
How do I know? My family got ensnared in the 1095-A paperwork pit. It’s a government roach motel: Taxpayers check in, but can never check out.
In 2013, our Anthem Blue Cross plan got canceled because of “changes from health-care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).”
Millions like us in the individual market for health insurance — including self-employed people, small-business owners, writers and artists — suffered the same fate.
My husband contacted Colorado’s exchange, “Connect for Health Colorado,” to see what our options were. We later settled on purchasing a new, non-ObamaCare plan from a different private insurer, Rocky Mountain Health.
The provider network is much narrower than the plan we had before the feds intervened.
Our kids’ dental care is no longer covered, and we’ve had our insurance turned down at an urgent-care clinic — something that had never happened before. Better off? Bullcrap. But wait, it gets worse.
Somewhere along the way, Connect for Health Colorado dragooned us into an ObamaCare plan without our knowledge or consent.
Last month, we received an IRS 1095-A form, which indicated that we’d paid ObamaCare premiums every month in 2014.
It took hours on the phone and Internet to get an explanation on how this happened. Here was the government’s response, word for incomprehensible word:
‘‘We apologize for the delay in responding to your email. After checking your account we are showing you might have had coverage from October 2014 to June 2014. Please call the number below to speak with a Customer Service Representative if this information is incorrect.”
‘‘Might” have had coverage? From “October 2014 to June 2014”?
We were finally able to un-enroll in the ObamaCare plan.
Then, after being bounced around by the exchange to various voicemail dead ends, with hours of migraine-inducing on-hold music, we were told there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the 1095-A form — which shows payment of premiums we didn’t pay to a plan we never enrolled in and didn’t want in the first place.
This is just one little horror story. In California, at least 800,000 taxpayers got screwed-up 1095-As.
As a result, some 50,000 people filed the wrong form. Another 750,000 were told they’ll get corrected forms this month. Hah! Good luck with that.
The costs in time, money and anxiety to hardworking families dealing with this paperwork perdition are enormous.
Unknown numbers of people are still waiting for their forms as April 15 looms. More face the added expense and aggravation of filing amended returns through no fault of their own.
Most of the media have been insulated from these problems because they get their insurance through their employers.
But one other journalist smacked head-first into reality. Laura Krantz, a former NPR staffer, is now a Scripps Fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Earlier this month, she found out that Connect for Health Colorado had mysteriously canceled her health and dental insurance.
After four days in phone hell, she learned she had lost her insurance coverage and her tax credit — and had to redo all of her paperwork.
She still believes the ultimate solution is “single payer.” But another liberal who entered 1095-A hell has seen the light.
San Franciscan Melissa Klein, a former President Obama supporter, exposed her ordeal with Covered California last week. The exchange botched her 1095-A, then insisted she’d never enrolled despite invoices documenting her payments.
After hours in phone hell, her case remains unresolved, and she can’t file her taxes. How is it, she wondered, that “Amazon can ship something to NYC in an hour,” but the White House and Covered California “can’t create a health-care system that functions”?
Klein concluded, better late than never: “I no longer believe that the government should mandate health care … A great idea is just an idea if you can’t execute. And the government has proved time and time again, it can’t execute.”
Feelin’ your pain, sister. Is DC listening?