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The people I know got burned in one of two ways:

1) They did not realize that there was a low yearly cap on the total insurance payout (”mini-med”) plans.

2) They had plan like the one you described, got really sick (cancer, etc.), and were dropped next plan cycle - and left with no insurance from their old carrier, and no chance of getting new insurance except through a state “high-risk” pool, which was closed to new applicants or had a long waiting line.

These are the people who spend down their assets to bankruptcy and then go on Medicaid - essentially, the rest of us are their “backup” insurers.

A lot of people do not like the ACA because it essentially bans the first type of policy, and prevents the sort of cancellations in the second case.

IMO, it’s not as easy a call as it first appears: we naturally want people to have freedom of individual choice about want type of insurance to purchase, but a lot of people end up making a choice that *guarantees* their costs will be shifted to *rest of us* if things go wrong.

Plus, you have the issue that a lot of the people who *want* to be responsible *can’t* afford better insurance.

The end result is that unless you put your head in the sand and ignore that fact that *someone* ends up paying for such care, when you try to come up with a system where everyone pays at least *something* for care they will receive, you come up with mandatory insurance + minimum coverage requirements + subsidies - in other words, something rather like the ACA.

From this perspective, one of the major things wrong with the ACA is that by subsidizing existing insurance practices - which *depend* on making it hard to discover in advance what service is being provided and what it will cost - it perpetrates a system designed to make “comparison shopping” difficult or impossible and continues insurance practices which make it difficult to discover which high-deductible plans makes sense to a given consumer.

So I would argue that as regards such disclosure the ACA(which tries to make apples-to-apples comparisons between standardized plans possible) does not go *far enough*”, and mostly, as part of a cozy deal to protect the current Byzantine pricing and insurance arrangements between providers and insurers.

I am not aware of item 2 in the free market….prior to Obamacare. A principle of insurance is that when you have a claim, the company insuring you on the date of that claim is on the hook for that claim forever….that’s the risk. This is the evil of Obamacare - it “unisured the insured”

Also, the mini plans are the wrong way to go. Cat only,wtih high deducts, but something that will pay ALL of the cat is the soundest way to insure. Such plans are very much cheaper than most plans. This is the way we used to do it. It worked back then.