Marcela Diaz Santa, Fe created on Tue December 3, 2013

My name is Marcela Diaz. I direct Somas un Pueblo Unido, we’re a state wide immigrants rights organization and non profit with about 8 employees but only 5 full time employees. We offer health coverage at 80% for full time employees with the exception of a few employees that have been there for more than 10 years, we offer 100%, for our part-time employees we offer 40%. We have a 3 month probation period and so that they can decide if they want to stick with us and we want to stick with them and then we offer them health insurance.

So, we were with Presbyterian for a really long time and then the rates started getting really, really high, especially as we all got older. Some of us have been there since our early 20’s (surely when we were in our 20’s we were just incredibly healthy!) and not needing a lot of different service, but as we all got older our premiums got higher and higher. So, our executive director shopped around and decided to go with Lovelace.

So, I think there have been a lot of scare tactics that have been employed. We have been seeing consistently rates going up each year. Significantly. Our administrative director would inquire often asking, "Why is it going up? Why is it going up?" And since the ACA passed, although it hasn’t been implemented yet, the staff people at Lovelace kept saying, "Your rates are going up because of Obamacare. And we never really understood why that was the case, but they kept saying that. We just got a letter from Lovelace saying, because we insure with Lovelace as a non-profit (5-6 people) they will no longer cover us.

I didn’t know, non of us knew, that all of a sudden our insurance company wasn’t going to cover us anymore. We are a very small business. Well, there’s no question, I plan on continuing being insured by my organization (haha). So, now we’re going to find out if we are going to save a little more money with the Exchange. We’re human beings, with aging bodies.