My wife and I bought our health insurance through Chesepeake back before the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed into law. It was a very basic plan that provided very little actual protection except for catastrophic coverage. Since we are part of no group, our premiums were very high, but we were happy to have it for the safety net it provided.

Soon after Obamacare was enacted, Chesepeake notified us that it had decided to stop offering the plan due to “changes in the law” that would make it too expensive and unprofitable. They decided to just get out of that sector of the insurance business altogether due to Obamacare.

Supposedly, the big reason for Obamacare was to rein in these greedy, profiteering insurance companies and help individuals get insured more easily and cheaply, so we were, of course, surprised to learn that companies like Chesepeake had actually been so close to unprofitable in the health insurance business that they’d drop out of it that easily, and to see that obtaining our own insurance was actually becoming harder and more expensive as a result of a law that was supposed to have the opposite effect.

So then we found a high-deductible plan with Anthem that allowed us to have a Health Savings Account. The premiums were about $550 per month and our deductible was $10,000. It seemed very expensive for insurance that was almost never going to cover anything, but we could put about $6,000 into the HSA. It was less attractive and more expensive to us than the plan we had had with Chesepeake, but again, we were happy to have the safety net it provided.

HSAs were a great idea to inspire personal responsibility and make health insurance affordable to individuals. The intent is that you can fund the account with pre-tax dollars to cover a good portion of your health plan’s deductible. It’s still your money that you earned, but since one can pay it into the HSA bit by bit, it feels like part of the premium and then if you have medical expenses, even though you are paying for them with your money, it feels like you are covered.

But Obama did not like these accounts either, for some reason, so Obamacare started limiting them and changing the rules to make them less beneficial. After all, why should we greedy people be allowed to pay for our own health care with pre-tax dollars? So again, even though it was supposed to be a law that inspired people to get health insurance and made having health insurance more affordable, we again saw Obamacare doing the exact opposite of what it had been sold to do.

Then last week I got a letter from Anthem. Even though they took in about $6,000 more from us in premiums than they had to pay out for the few benefits we used through the year, “the rising costs of providing the services now required by law” was forcing them to increase our premiums by a whopping 53 percent. Yes, you read that right — a 53 percent increase in one fell swoop. That’s almost as high as the increase in the prices of gasoline and heating oil we have suffered under this President, almost as high as our grocery bills have risen under him.

Understand that this is not an increase because my wife and I are costing Anthem more money than the company projected. We were not sick and did not have anything more than a few minor claims last year. This is an increase because of the services they are now forced to provide to others that my wife and I are being made to pay for. If it was 1 or 2 percent, I could understand, but are there that many people out there now getting free abortions, breast implants and tummy tucks that it is driving my premiums up 53 percent?

We had always carried insurance in case of the unforeseen disaster, such as a major illness that would have broken us. But since we can now wait and just buy insurance after we are diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc… after my hip starts to go and needs replacement, after my wife needs a new kidney, and since the insurer cannot refuse us or charge us a higher premium and will need, under law, to cover us for those pre-existing conditions, I’m thinking that it is time to start saving the thousands of dollars a year we have been wasting on health insurance premiums and using that to fund a few vacations and maybe buy a sports car.

And if a guy like me, who always earned his keep and paid his own way, is starting to feel this way, then those less proud and less principled are likely already there. And this is the true effect of Obamacare that you will never read about in Obama-worshipping newspapers, except in letters like this.

Frank Marino is a self-employed patent agent in Meredith.