On October 21st, President Barack Obama touted Jessica Sanford as a success story of ObamaCare. Unfortunately for Obama, Jessica Sanford was dropped from her HealthCare plan and will receive no tax credits.
In one of his famous photo-ops in the Rose Garden with an array of touted beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act behind him, President Obama read a letter from Jessica Sanford of Federal Way, Wash., to explain why the Affordable Care Act, with all its rollout flaws, was still needed.
The letter told a sad tale of a grateful single mom with a son with ADHD.
But now, like so many of ObamaCare’s false promises and outright lies, the safe and secure future which Sanford thought she had found and which the president boasted of has crumbled into dust.
As the Washington State Wire reports, the Washington state exchange and enrollment website, like its national cousin, had problems. It had told Sanford originally she and her child would get a whopping tax credit that would reduce her total premium to $169 a month for an ObamaCare “gold” plan.
Then she got letters from the state telling her — just like so many others who have had their plans canceled after being told they could keep them — what she had been promised was not true.
Four days after President Obama made his address, the state health exchange publicly revealed a grievous error — its tax-credit calculations were all wrong.
Washington state had been submitting monthly income information to the federal data hub when it was expecting yearly data. Oops!
“It was a huge disappointment… I just felt really embarrassed that, you know, he had quoted my story and then come to find that the Washington Healthplan Finder, the website here in our state, had grossly miscalculated, or they’re having a problem figuring their tax credits. So at least for right now I’m not going to be getting insurance.” – Jessica Sanford
So everyone who bought a subsidized health insurance policy through the Washington state exchange prior to Oct. 23 was being quoted too low a rate.
Sanford, 48, doesn’t make a lot — a little less than $50,000 a year as a freelance court reporter.
But Washington state reported her income as $4,166, which the feds took as her annual salary. It was that, er, “glitch” that allowed Sanford to qualify for a discount of $452 a month. It was that good news that prompted her to write a thank-you note to the president.
Brokers had been informing the state for three weeks that the calculations were screwy but the state, like the proverbial Department of Motor Vehicles, was slow to respond. When it informed Sanford of the mistake, knocking her tax credit down to $110 a month, she went back to her broker and signed up for a “silver” plan with higher deductibles and co-pays.
Investors.com
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