What it feels like to be lost at sea

If you haven't dealt directly with a health insurance company in recent years, you may soon be in for a rude awakening. Through repeated attempts the last few months to glean fairly straightforward information about health coverage from the five companies licensed to sell in Kentucky, I've found that they appear to be hiding  any employees capable of doing much more than writing your name down and saying "I don't know."

After another trip through the fabulous five just now, I found the ignorance has taken on a distinct arrogance as well. I've heard others suggest health insurers under complete government control would be like the DMV, but I've never been treated nearly as disdainfully in all my years chasing down answers to drivers license issues.

Gilligan was never so lost on the abandoned island as these people seem to be. And wrapped in the protective arms of federal and state government control, there is no reason to expect consumers to have any kind of weight to throw around with "health insurance companies" under ObamaCare.

Yesterday was the deadline for insurance companies to apply to state health benefit exchanges to sell insurance through them beginning January 1, 2014. Earlier today, I asked all five companies in Kentucky (Anthem, Humana, Assurant, Golden Rule and John Alden) if they even applied and couldn't even get a single answer to that. I asked the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange which companies met the deadline and, of course, got no aswer from them either.

They can't keep it a secret for long. But that deer in the headlights look? Unfortunately, you may need to get used to that.