Not clear on Obamacare? Find your answers here

A list of online resources to help you find the answers to your Obamacare questions

If you’ve been following the news surrounding the Supreme Court’s “Obamacare” decision, chances are you fall into one of two camps—either for, or against.  There isn’t much of an “undecided” contingent among voters when it comes to the Affordable Care Act.  But deep down, none of us knows what the hell we’re talking about, so for those looking to beef up their bullshitting skills when debating with someone from the opposite camp, I’ve compiled a few online resources for your perusal.

For information:

If you really want to impress people with your googling savvy, you can start by reading the Act, itself.  You can find all ten titles plus their amendments here, at Healthcare.gov.  Word of warning: it’s a doozy, so don’t think you’re going to read it all in one sitting.  The actual piece of legislation was 2,700 pages, and the pdf offered via the website is just shy of 1,000 pages, so maybe eat a light snack before you settle in.

The White House held “office hours” Thursday afternoon via Twitter to answer questions.  The transcript was posted at Storify (of which the White House is a fairly regular user), so you may want to check it out to see if your questions about the Affordable Care Act were answered in net-speak.

Want to see how “Obamacare” compares to “Romneycare”?  You can do so here, at the website for the state of Massachusetts’ Health and Human Services office.

There are a lot of pundits throwing out obscure numbers and “facts” that would have been pretty difficult, if not impossible to verify 20 years ago.  Now, thanks to Google, you can look up a factoid pretty quickly.  But you can google until your fingers fall off from lack of circulation and you probably still won’t be any clearer on where those pundits got their numbers.  Politifact is a good place to start.  A project of the Tampa Bay Times, the site's team researches statements made by politicians and TV personalities to determine their truthfulness.  You can check out the Truth-o-Meter ratings on the health care debate here.

The next steps:

Are you uninsured, but don’t know where to start?  You can start by comparing quotes.  Health insurance price comparison websites like GoHealthInsurance.com allow you to get a baseline idea for what you’ll have to pay by simply plugging in your zip code, age, sex, and whether or not you smoke. 

"If you’re a technology shopping platform and the government mandates that everyone buy the products you offer or face a tax, that’s a good position to be in," said Michael Mahoney, VP of Consumer Marketing for GoHealth.

You can check out coverage details, compare deductibles and premiums, and figure out how much it will cost to keep you and your family alive.  Of course, you may notice that there are a few things that most (if not all) private health insurers won’t cover right now—like maternity and delivery services—that they will have to cover in 2014.

Fleeing:

For those who have promised to book the first flight to Canada in the event that the Affordable Care Act is upheld, you can compare flight prices at Kayak or Hipmunk.  Just a heads up, though: Canada has universal health care, so…

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