Category Archives: Health

ObamaCare- Veterans Should Not Apply?

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Land Mines to avoid when leaving an HSA

Here’s an update to one of my more popular posts regarding Veterans and ObamaCare.

As of 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka ObamaCare (I will use the more popular nickname for the rest of the article) is being listed as an option on the military’s Tricare website.

There’s no neon sign at the top of the Tricare page alerting you to this fact. It’s not listed as a disclaimer, waiver, footnote, or disclosure on the page. You have to read between the lines and click around to figure this out.

On Tricare’s page about ObamaCare, it states that any of the Tricare plans (plus the ‘US Family Health Plan’) meets the Obamacare ‘Minimum Essential Coverage’ standard as of 2014. In other words, if you’re enrolled in one of the Tricare plans, you ‘don’t need to take any action at this time’.

For those who feel like they need to dig deeper (and I always do), there is yet another link on the right to the ‘Tricare and the Affordable Care Act’ Fact Sheet , which states (last paragraph): Continue reading →

ObamaCare - Veterans (Still) Need Not Apply (!)

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Land Mines to avoid when leaving an HSA

[2014 Update: According to TriCare’s website, Veterans are eligible for ObamaCare if they choose not to enroll/pay-in to Tricare. See updated post on Veterans and ObamaCare for more info].

This is a follow-up to my original post which noted the fact that Retired Veterans (and Feds) are ineligible for Obamacare. Too bad, because in some financial circumstances, ObamaCare may provide better coverage per dollar than TriCare or FEHB.

There’s some horrible mis-information about the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) on the internet(s).

I’ve even seen a GovExec article telling Feds that they can opt out of FEHB and go on an ObamaCare exchange (they can’t - see the application form for ObamaCare).

In short, I would not trust any ObamaCare info posted on a webpage that does not end with .mil or .gov.

Here’s a summary of TriCare/ObamaCare mis-information that I’d like to squash right now:
Continue reading →

PlanSmartChoice - A Flawed FEHB Open Season Analysis Tool

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Bugs Bunny Image Courtesy Warner Brothers

Bugs Bunny Image Courtesy Warner Brothers

Happy Open Season, Feds!

It’s that time of year again where 95 percent of you do nothing and keep your existing health plan (for good reasons, see below).

For the minority of you who are considering switching plans, FEHB offers you the 3rd party tool PlanSmartChoice.com, which allows you to plug-in some assumptions about your family size and frequency of medical claims. If you’ve used PlanSmartChoice before, it retains the info you input from last year, which is nice. Here’s what it looks like for me: Continue reading →