7 On Your Side's Michael Finney has health care hotline success

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- 7 On Your Side's Michael Finney has been getting out the word about the Affordable Care Act since it began. And, every year Michael, hosts a live signup during ABC7 News' broadcasts. "We run reports, field phone calls and hope we are getting health insurance information to those in need," he notes. Here is one of those victories:

Recently Angela Talburt and I spent some time together in a San Jose park. We met to talk about the night, about a month ago, when she was watching a 7 On Your Side report on a company called Stride Health.

"I was watching and said, 'I am going to give that one a try,'" she recalled.

That man being interviewed was Noah Lang, the CEO and co-founder of Stride Health, a company specializing in finding health insurance for independent contractors and part-time workers.

"More and more people are either working for themselves, or they work for an employer that doesn't give them benefits," Lang said during the report, "and so there's a lot of really hard things that come along with working in that way."

Stride Health looks for the best insurance deal. It works on commission - and it worked for Angela.

"I had answers within minutes. We qualified for the government grant," Angela told me. "I put in all the numbers and got one dollar per person in the household, and I was like, 'yea, I can do that.'"

Lizelda Lopez works for Covered California and was thrilled to hear Angela's story.

"This is a wonderful example of somebody who was inspired to look into it and figured out she qualifies for a lot of financial assistance to the point where she is almost paying nothing," Lopez said.

Lopez says although the deadline has passed for getting insurance on Jan. 1, you can still signup and have your insurance take effect a month or two later.

"It seems clear to me and to many people," Lopez says, "that the affordable care act is absolutely working in the state of California."

Click here for a look at more stories by Michael Finney and 7 On Your Side.