John Webster

Self-employed and working three jobs, Tim Ray expects his health insurance to protect him all day long – not just on nights and weekends. So he was surprised to learn that Group Health, his longtime insurance carrier and one of Washington’s largest, decided this year to stop covering workplace-caused illness and injury in its individual and small-group plans.

Paul Allen said the concert changed his life. A few hundred yards from where it happened, he later built the Experience Music Project, a shrine to rock ’n’ roll and the artist who had set Allen’s imagination on fire, one spring day in 1969. Me, I was just a kid who lived in an old house on a gravel street in Olympia. Down in my basement bedroom, a homemade wire antenna snaked through the window frame, down the concrete wall and into the back of a big Zenith vacuum-tube AM radio.

The bride could blink, and that was all. The groom, her longtime boyfriend, sang her a love song, and then they married. Gathered around her in the nursing home, her loved ones cried, joy mingling with their grief.

Competition to control the cost of new individual health policies has led two of Washington’s biggest insurance companies to exclude Eastern Washington’s largest hospital, and many of its physicians, from their networks of preferred providers. Hit by the exclusions are Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center, Providence Holy Family Hospital and about 500 Spokane-area physicians that Providence has added to its network over the past few years.

Tom Foley served Eastern Washington at a time when the federal government invested aggressively in the folks back home.     Congressional leaders from both parties occupied the political center and worked together on historic reforms, including civil rights, a social safety net, environmental laws, expansion of airports and interstate freeways, promotion of foreign trade and the funding of research universities. By the time Foley left office, politics had changed. But so had the region he served. Today, the legacy of Foley’s leadership can be found all over the 5th Congressional District, and well beyond:

Heavy traffic and opening-day technical glitches made Washington’s new Health Plan Finder website difficult, if not impossible, to use Tuesday. But if a group of volunteers recruited by The Spokesman-Review is any indication, the demand for decent health coverage is considerable.

Suffering? Getting old? The pharmaceutical industry wants to help. Every night on TV, photogenic actors frolic with photogenic grandchildren, or lounge in bathtubs gazing into the setting sun, telling emotion-laden tales of 30-second Madison Avenue cures: E.D.? Low T? R.A.? COPD? Dry eye? Sneezy? Wheezy? Queasy? There’s a drug for that. And all the consumer needs to do – all together, now – is “Talk to your doctor.”

How will the Affordable Care Act affect you? Most Americans will be affected in some way, but the answer depends on where they live and how they get – or don’t get – health coverage now. The state in which people live is a factor because some states, such as Washington, have worked for years to implement the law and have taken advantage of federal funding to expand Medicaid. But other states, such as Idaho, fought the law, delayed their implementation work and refused to accept federal Medicaid expansion dollars. In states such as Florida and Georgia, elected officials not only have fought the federal law, they’ve said they intend to make it difficult for their uninsured residents to sign up for health care coverage.

At 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 3, the switchboard turned on and the phones began to ring. Callers from all over Washington wanted to know how to qualify for health insurance coverage. They dialed the right place.