My wife had cancer in 1994. The small business where she worked at the time lost their insurance over it. She hasn’t been insured for 19 years. The only bright spot: the indications that your leukemia is back for more include full-body bruising and blood coming out your ears when you floss, so at least we haven’t spent the decades wondering if something was lurking that regular followups might have found.

I have melanoma, the cancer that lurks. I’m now on a followup schedule that continues until I die of something else or the lurking semi-solid cells that are statistically likely to be somewhere in my body hit a switch and start to multiply again.

Our business has never been big enough to offer insurance–we knew from 1994 that plans to cover fewer than 50 people wouldn’t pay out or would take the premiums and run if we ever made a claim, so we didn’t bother to offer our people the option to make Blue Cross richer in order to feel better before they were sick.

Two critical points:

-In the past 4 weeks, I have received 5 resumes from exactly the kind of people we would like to hire more of. All say they’ll be available around the 1st of the year. Demographically they’re very different from the resumes I’ve seen over 15 years in this business. They’re younger and looking for fewer hours doing something they already know is hard in ways they enjoy. They can afford to leave Big Ugly Death Star Corp. because they can buy health insurance.

-I was diagnosed in Sept. 2011. Because my state had already implemented the part of the ACA that requires insurance companies to continue policies at similar rates EVEN IF the individuals on them make claims–not something we expected after our earlier experience–I’m still insured. We’re going to buy an exchange plan that puts our family on one deductible and OOP max, for the first time ever, next week.

The technical issue we discovered with the web site was after applying: whoever coded the citizenship for adopted people section of the eligibility database chose the wrong field type for the only way our government has to verify my kid’s here legally. So we have to talk to a manager with superpowers before we can choose among the 57 (!) options to get our family covered.

As a parent, a spouse and a small business owner, I would carry the Congresscritters and President who got us these solutions across a river of acid on my back to keep them.

Must be nice to be so rich and healthy that you just don’t get how minor the bugs in the app are.