Originally Posted by kane

I can actually speak to this with some authority. I used to have a catastrophic only policy. I work for myself and I have asthma so I was never able to buy regular health insurance and had to pay for most things out of pocket.

With Obamacare that changed. . . mostly. I am paying more for my coverage, but I get a whole lot more and in the long run I will end up saving money each year (not a lot, but I will save some and I have much better coverage).

There are many different medications for asthma. When I got my insurance they sent me a list of "approved" medications. These are medicines that I can get with a small co-pay (after the annual deductible is met). They had a separate list of medicines that I would have to pay more for. Typically my co pay would be around 30% of the cost of the medicine. There were still other medications that they would only cover if I had tried other (read cheaper) types of medication and my doctor wasn't happy with how they worked.

Luckily for me, the medicine I use was on the approved list otherwise I would have pay more for it or jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get a medicine covered.

So if you are like me it works great. If you are someone who needs a medication that is not on the approved list you may end up paying a lot more for it.