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Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

nytimes.com

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Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#61

Post by rdouble »

haploid wrote: post #54
jimbokun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just can't understand any of it." Neither can those of us who live here. I mean, I can kind of understand the series of historical accidents of how we got here. What I can't understand are the politicians promising to fight tooth and nail to roll back the very minor reforms just enacted, and all of the people who enthusiastically just voted them into office last election, based on that platform.

I can give you one perspective. Moral hazard and fairness. The vast majority of costs borne by and in the US healthcare system are the results of overeating, oversmoking, and underexercising. Period. Heart disease, many forms of cancer, diabetes, most forms of pancreatic, gallbladder, and adrenal conditions, are largely the result of personal choice . Setting aside for a moment the fact that congenital defects, hered…

The same lifestyle diseases are at the top of the list for every country that already has some form of universal health care.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#62

Post by gnaritas »

marshray wrote: post #49
jimbokun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just can't understand any of it." Neither can those of us who live here. I mean, I can kind of understand the series of historical accidents of how we got here. What I can't understand are the politicians promising to fight tooth and nail to roll back the very minor reforms just enacted, and all of the people who enthusiastically just voted them into office last election, based on that platform.

Those "minor reforms" were 10,000 pages long and I doubt that anyone understands them except the lobbyists who wrote them.

> Those "minor reforms" were 10,000 pages long

So what? We live in a litigious society, laws are verbose because they have to be. Make it too vague and you just force the issues to be resolved in the courts making it even more confusing because the rules become written in case law.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#63

Post by andrewpbrett1 »

Shameless plug: I'm working on a startup that, while it won't be able to directly fix people being denied coverage, will hopefully help people to understand their coverage a bit better. http://cakehealth.com. Not yet open to all but you can sign up if that sounds interesting to you. We And on a related note, I have noprocrast enabled so apologies for the n00b-looking account, real uid = andrewpbrett. Someone alerted me that this was being discussed.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#65

Post by health-anon »

I'm an entrepreneur with a wife and son. I'm 23. We pay $360/mo for individual insurance and it is pretty crappy. The deductible is high and there are several "up-front" visits, which means the first X times we go to the doctor the insurance pays nothing and deducts one of our up-front visits. Each of us have X of these, so the first X times wife goes in, and then the same for me, they are not taken from the same pool. This accumulates to several hundred dollars of visits before insurance pays for anything, and then we still have the deductible to churn through, and they've applied regular visits to that as well.

We're struggling to make ends meet here; our clients are good and we're trying to build a steadier base, but the pay is irregular and sometimes we have trouble meeting monthly obligations.

They make it such a hassle to do anything and they rip us off so hard (providers and insurers alike) that we usually just don't pay our medical bills except what we have to pay up-front. It's too much crap to deal with, the insurance always makes up a reason not to cover things, and it's absurdly expensive. Every time we have tried to pay the people have come back saying we'd owe literally 10x more than they we were originally told we would owe. It's just not worth the headache or the hassle, much easier to silence unrecognized numbers from bill collectors and let their corrupt and evil system rot in on itself.

We don't really have the option of not getting health care and dying, we don't go to the doctor for fun, we only go when we have to.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#66

Post by protomyth »

marshray wrote: post #49
jimbokun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just can't understand any of it." Neither can those of us who live here. I mean, I can kind of understand the series of historical accidents of how we got here. What I can't understand are the politicians promising to fight tooth and nail to roll back the very minor reforms just enacted, and all of the people who enthusiastically just voted them into office last election, based on that platform.

Those "minor reforms" were 10,000 pages long and I doubt that anyone understands them except the lobbyists who wrote them.

Well, the health bill that was passed had a lot of the standard "real rules coming later" in it. So, actually reading the bill didn't give much information either. I was really interested in what would be an acceptable insurance based on deductible.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#67

Post by troels »

acabal wrote: post #2

This really highlights how utterly insane our system is. I'm living off of my own business, which means that I don't have an employer to cover me under group insurance. But I really only make enough to live frugally and save a tiny amount each month--to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month. Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the…

> the only country to still tax you if you live abroad

Not that it has anything to do with the main subject, but that is not true. Other countries tax their expat citizens.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#68

Post by Groxx »

acabal wrote: post #29
Groxx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month. Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation. This fits a fair number of cost complaints I hear over healthcare. Who wouldn't like to pay $50-100/month to have something better than emergency healthcare support? But thi…

All good points, but the fact remains that at my income, it simply doesn't make financial sense for me to be insured. If I must declare bankruptcy in case of cataclysm, then the system just lost much more money than they would have were I paying an affordable (sliding?) amount per month over my lifespan. Anyway, this isn't the place to get in a discussion about how to fix the system. But as it stands now, it's just a…

Totally agree, for relatively healthy younger people willing to risk bankruptcy, it's a massively cheaper option. I'm merely saying that that kind of cost is nearly impossible to achieve, as reaching it would incur costs elsewhere. Distributing the cost doesn't make it less real.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#69

Post by joe_the_user »

haploid wrote: post #54
jimbokun wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just can't understand any of it." Neither can those of us who live here. I mean, I can kind of understand the series of historical accidents of how we got here. What I can't understand are the politicians promising to fight tooth and nail to roll back the very minor reforms just enacted, and all of the people who enthusiastically just voted them into office last election, based on that platform.

I can give you one perspective. Moral hazard and fairness. The vast majority of costs borne by and in the US healthcare system are the results of overeating, oversmoking, and underexercising. Period. Heart disease, many forms of cancer, diabetes, most forms of pancreatic, gallbladder, and adrenal conditions, are largely the result of personal choice . Setting aside for a moment the fact that congenital defects, hered…

I'd have up voted you if you hadn't said "period". Unhealthy behavior is a biggie but anyone that says "here, this ONLY is the problem" just adds to the mess.

The US health care system is melange of many complex and perverse incentives. I recall a study saying unhealthy behavior adds at most 50% to costs but costs have increased many more times than that in the last thirty years. The billing system, medical education system, end-of-life-care, the health insurance system, ad-nauseum. It takes a LOT of crazy schemes to eat up 20% of the GDP of the once-most-prosperous country in the world.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#70

Post by Groxx »

billjings wrote: post #60
Groxx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month. Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation. This fits a fair number of cost complaints I hear over healthcare. Who wouldn't like to pay $50-100/month to have something better than emergency healthcare support? But thi…

We are way, way above the amount of money health care should cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-... So as a matter of priority versus other spending outlays, we're way out of line. Here's per capita GDP: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=per+capita+GDP Spitballing from these numbers, it looks like we spend about as much in absolute terms as Switzerland, with everyone else way, way fa…

Nope, I'm pretty sure everyone agrees it's broken. And just to re-clarify: I'm not claiming we're not paying too much. I agree with everything you've said. Just that $50-100/month is un-doably low regardless of brokenness.

I'll be reading through the links, I can always use more detailed info for future debates. Thanks!

edit for repliers: before stating that location X has 100 or less per month, how much do your taxes cost for this? That counts too, ya know.

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