Did You Buy Your Own Health Insurance This Year? Tell Us How Much It Cost

Tomorrow is the last day of open enrollment on the Affordable Care Act exchange. That means if you buy your own insurance for yourself or your family—if you don’t get it through the government or your employer, that is—you have until midnight Pacific Time on Saturday (3 a.m. on Sunday ET) to do it.

All signs indicate fewer people will do this in 2018 than in previous years, thanks in large part to the Trump administration slashing the marketing budget to actually inform people they need to enroll, and the 2017 tax bill, which repealed the individual mandate.

The Affordable Care Act is very complicated, as are the exchanges. Your premiums are determined by things like where you live and how old you are, but also whether you qualify for subsidies based on your income. The Kaiser Family Foundation found earlier this year that 4.2 million people in the U.S. “are eligible to purchase a bronze plan with $0 premiums after subsidies in 2019.” But that doesn’t mean you’ll pay nothing for your care: Bronze plans tend to have much higher deductibles, around $5,800 on average in 2018, according to CNBC. (Bronze plans are great if you plan to never get sick, which is pretty much everyone until you do.)

If you don’t want a Bronze plan with a high deductible, the next step up is a Silver plan. Those will have an average monthly premium of $495 for a 40-year-old, according to Modern Healthcare.

If you purchased health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange this year, I’d love to know how much it cost. If you’d like to help out, send me screenshot of your plan’s premium and deductible to [email protected]—you can redact any personal information you don’t want us to see, but don’t worry, we won’t publish the screenshots you send us or any details that would personally identify you.

I’d also love to know how you’re feeling about it, too: Can you afford it? Do you worry about paying for healthcare? Are you mad? Because I’m mad at this absurd, evil, violent system, and I want to tell the world how much you’re having to fork over to these bullshit insurance companies every month.