Huffington Post: Obamacare Victims Are Real

A Thursday Huffington Post article highlighting Obamacare victims is causing quite a stir on the left.

The piece, titled “How Obamacare Leaves Some People Without Doctors,” breaks from the Huffington Post’s usual embrace of Obamacare and features the voices of Covered California customers who are already dissatisfied with the health insurance they bought through the Covered California exchange. 

“My insurance is pretty useless,” 35-year-old new Los Angeles mother Ruth Iorio told HuffPo. “I don’t know what to do. I may just drop it for myself and keep my son on it. It’s really depressing.”

Iorio says her Obamacare plan is worthless because after over a dozen calls, she still cannot find doctors who accept her Obamacare plan who are also practicing in a hospital that accepts her coverage. Prior to buying through the California Obamacare exchange Iorio had an individual Blue Shield plan that cost less and covered a wide array of doctors and hospitals. Iorio’s plan is so bad that after giving birth to her son she learned her Obamacare plan did not cover her UCLA ob-gyn, forcing her to pay out of pocket.

“I’m paying $500 a month and every doctor I’m calling is saying, ‘No, I can’t see you,'” said Iorio.

She added, “I feel like a second-class citizen.”

Iorio is not alone, reports the Huffington Post. Another woman, Noam Friedlander, 40, needed back surgery for a herniated disc and thought her Obamacare plan would cover the costs. But after spending “days on the phone, hours on hold, making dozens of calls across Southern California, trying to match a surgeon with a hospital that would both be covered,” Friedlander came to a stark realization.

“No one could help me. Some expressed sympathy. They told me, ‘I’m so sorry–it’s all just so new. You’re a victim of the changes. No one knows what they’re doing,” Friedlander said.

After calling 20 surgeons and five hospitals, Friedlander, had to get two credit cards to pay $16,000 out of pocket.

Iorio and Friedlander are feeling the pain of Obamacare’s “narrow networks,” which the Washington Post warned “are going to make people furious–but they might control costs.”

Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters have attacked Obamacare victims and their stories. Reid went so far as to say “all of them are untrue.”