Seek and ye shall find, and not be turned down

In 2014, I joined the ranks of those Delawareans whose health insurance was cancelled.

That insurance I was promised I could keep? It no longer exists.

That coverage I wanted to continue? I couldn’t.

As you might imagine, I am now hoppin’ … mad? Not really, I’m fairly satisfied.

Not thrilled necessarily. Shopping for health insurance ranks among the more tiresome tasks of modern life.

But there’s a big - no, huge - difference between now and 2009, when I first began shopping for health insurance.

(One reason people lost coverage was because insurance companies continued to sell substandard policies they knew wouldn’t qualify under the new rules. President Obama didn’t make a big deal about this because he needed to work with these companies.)

Obamacare didn’t make shopping for health insurance any less boring, but it is less scary.

That’s because: Now I know I can get health insurance. I don’t have to worry about me or my family being turned down because of a pre-existing condition. (Or, in our case, a non-existent pre-existing condition, which is really frustrating, but that’s another story.)

I went online, looked over various plans that were offered in Delaware and picked one. It was a little more expensive than what we had last year, but much cheaper than a HIPAA policy we had a couple of years ago.

That policy was both costly and scary. It included a provision that said if for some reason you lost your HIPAA policy - I was afraid a payment would be lost somehow - you had to wait six months before you could reapply.

In other words, for six months you would face potential bankruptcy. One serious illness or injury could be enough to wipe out your life savings.

According to a study by NerdWallet, medical bills are the single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, accounting for more than 50 percent of filings. One reason is insurance companies used to set annual and lifetime coverage caps. When you reached the limit, you were on your own.

Obamacare ended that practice, along with the pre-existing condition provisions. Add the ability to include children up to age 26 on your policy, and you have three improvements that millions of people have taken advantage of.

And there may be further benefits. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Obamacare may have contributed to the recent slowing of healthcare costs increases. (There are other factors, including the economy.)

A Project Syndicate report said that Obamacare has also encouraged ways to improve care and lower costs. One of the most vexing problems is the tiny fraction of patients who represent a large portion of healthcare spending.

A doctor in Camden, N.J., is now trying to better and more economically serve “super-utilizers,” the 1 percent of Medicaid patients who account for 30 percent of the program’s costs.

The problem wasn’t fraud. It was, Project Syndicate said, a lack of coordinated medical care and attention to underlying risk factors.

With the problem identified, perhaps that situation will be improved.

These promising signs don’t mean it’s time to break out the bubbly. (While perhaps beneficial in small amounts, champagne is not covered under Obamacare.)

But think how much negative coverage there would be if the early reports looked bad, as they did for last year’s Obamacare rollout.

Now Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, are promising (threatening?) new healthcare legislation.

If they can improve Obamacare, good for them.

But stripping people of insurance they now have would be a disgrace.

Encouraging and helping people to get health insurance is in the country’s interest. Here’s why: If someone gets seriously injured, she winds up at a hospital emergency room.

The hospitals are required to treat that person, which they do.

Those medical services cost money. If the person is uninsured and unable to pay - which is common because of the great expense - that cost is borne by others, including those who pay for health insurance.

So, we already had universal healthcare coverage - everybody could get treated at the local ER - but the system, such as it was, allowed us to pretend we didn’t.

It also allowed us to pretend there was no cost to treating the uninsured.

And it allowed the uninsured to reach into our wallets and force us to pay for their coverage.

That was Mitt Romney’s argument when writing a USA Today opinion piece in 2009 about his healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

“Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others,” Romney wrote.

Now there was a candidate who made sense.