Whoops! Woman Who Got Obamacare Shout-Out From Obama Himself Now Says She Can’t Afford Insurance

Whoops! Woman Who Got Obamacare Shout-Out From Obama Himself Now Says She Can’t Afford Insurance

Jessica Sanford was such a big Obamacare success story that Barack Obama personally talked about her story. Unfortunately for her, her “success story” wasn’t so successful after all.

Jessica Sanford

Jessica Sanford, the Federal Way woman who got a shout-out from President Obama last month with her fan letter for the Affordable Care Act, got a rather rude awakening last week. Turns out she doesn’t qualify for a tax credit after all.

At least that’s what the letter said that she got from the state. Now she says her dream of affordable health insurance has gone poof. She can’t afford it. She’ll have to go without. “I’m really terribly embarrassed,” she says. “It has completely turned around on me. I mean, completely.”

Chalk it up to a bollixed-up state website that apparently still has major problems. Originally it said Sanford and her child would get a whopping tax credit that would reduce their total premium to $169 a month. Now the state is telling her it goofed — twice — and she has to pay full ticket. There may even be a third goof involved: At least one health-insurance broker says she may qualify for a tax credit after all, albeit a small one. Officials at the state Healthplanfinder website could not be contacted Sunday night. But it just goes to show that even in the state of Washington, which has earned national kudos for a health-insurance exchange that seems to function better than the dysfunctional federal website, there are big, big problems.

“They have to own up to what is going on,” Sanford says. “They have to fix it. They can’t just go around and say this is working great. In my opinion they ought to shut it down and just get all of it straightened out.”

Obamacare doesn’t even qualify as a train wreck at this point. It’s more like a train somehow hitting on an exploding blimp and having the whole mess land on an ocean liner that’s crashing into an iceberg.

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