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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

#311

Post by jseifer »

krschultz wrote: post #180
georgieporgie wrote: post #84

I'm 35, single, and paying something like $120 per month for Blue Cross coverage that I found on ehealthinsurance. I've used them each time I've not been actively employed, and I've always found an acceptable deal. Mind you, I took the high deductible route since I'm only concerned with catastrophic illness at right now. Also, the moment anything serious comes up, they can cleverly drop me, since they have ludicrous…

Have you actually tried getting a big claim paid by them. My GF is currently embroiled in a dispute with United Healthcare over a temporary insurance plan she bought to cover the gap between graduating college and when her full time position started covering her (wouldn't it have been great if the new healthcare law was in effect at the time and she could have stayed on her parents insurance). Anyway, she had a hospi…

United denies everything they possibly can and they make "mistakes" that take so long to find you get past their dispute time.

Do not go through United trying to get them to pay this. Prepare for a day spent on the phone with the hospital until you find the person in the billing or services department who can really get to the bottom of it. They will figure out for you which technicality the insurance company is trying to use and what the correct one is. I had something similar happen and, after a day on the phone, was able to get the incorrect code that was used, how much they were supposed to pay, and what to say to them (this needs to be reprocessed according to X agreement).

From there you need to write a letter to United saying you want the case appealed. Send it certified mail and be prepared for the first response acknowledging your letter and the second one, about 30 days later, with the result of your appeal.

PS: I would have emailed this to you but couldn't find any contact information in your profile.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#312

Post by wtallis »

s3graham wrote: post #258
Groxx wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate taxes come out of paychecks. Unless all that is refunded if that's their income, then they're still paying something for it in addition to their direct monthly bill. It can be carried further: money they get refunded comes out of other areas' funding, as the difference gets made up somehow. Their property taxes go up, the cost of food goes up because others are carrying a heavier burden, jobs across the boa…

But by the "whole system" argument you're making, health care could easily have a negative cost. Let's hypothesize that all the engineers working in SV get an AIDS-like illness caused by spending too much time on news.yc. If there was a health care solution that would make sure that all the employees of Google, Intel, HP, etc. continued to function as usual by caring for those engineers, then even an extremely high u…

Before that positive outcome can have a chance of happening, we have to get rid of the obscenely expensive hopeless palliative end-of-life care (cue teabaggers screaming about "death panels"), and make basic healthcare universally available.

The only ways that increased healthcare spending can increase productivity are through effective preventive measures and corrective treatments that return the patient to sufficient health to be productive, but that's not where our super-high healthcare costs come from.

They come from the consequences of delayed care (eg. using only emergency rooms when you're uninsured, necessitating more risky treatments for more advanced problems, which means higher malpractice premiums) and from end-of-life care.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#313

Post by jasonkester »

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…

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.

Actually, that's exactly the policy you want as a healthy 26 year old: $5,000 deductible catastrophic coverage, and nothing more. It'll cost you $86 per month from Blue Shield.

Health insurance, in the sense that you see it in group policies from your employer, is not worth the cost if you're buying it yourself. It will be 15 years before you get to the point where a $50 copay and low deductible make sense. Think about it. How often are you at the doctor? Once a year? Once every 3 years? And it costs you a hundred bucks or so. That's not something you need to be insuring yourself against.

The key is to keep a bit of insurance just in case you get in that car crash and need new hip joints, or if you suddenly develop bone cancer and are looking at $10k/month health care bills. Those things are crazy rare, and the policy that protects you against them is priced accordingly.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#315

Post by davidw »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #116
wtracy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your earlier post: while people who want to strike out will, and figure out how to make it work. You claim that anyone who wants to be self-employed is able to do so. The next post provides a counterexample to your blanket statement. Then you get angry that he's telling an "anecdote"?

Let me see if I understand what you're saying. I make a generalization that people who want to will form a startup regardless of circumstances. The counterpoint to that was providing an example of somebody who didn't form a startup because of some condition. That's known as a counter-factual: taking what actually happened and changing something and saying that it would come out differently had this one thing changed.…

> I flagged the story.

Thanks!

In terms of actual data, I believe that countries like Germany have more small businesses than in the US, so I think that, at the margin, health care probably is important to potential founders. I know it's one reason against moving back to the US for me, although probably not the deciding one for or against.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#316

Post by enjo »

WildUtah wrote: post #303
dalke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year visiting California I was sick for over a week. 30 minutes for a prescription (which I knew would be the result of that visit) cost me $600. $300 for the doctor and the same for the hospital. In New Mexico (one of the poorest states in the US), the equivalent a few years previous cost me about $100. I stopped getting insurance because as a self-employed person it was expensive and rising. I played the odds…

In a civilized country, if you knew what the prescription would be, you could just walk into a pharmacy and buy it. The dotor charges $600 and provides no value. He exists to charge rent on his DEA license.

You do realize how terrible that idea is right? We'd see the rates of antibiotic resistant bacteria go through the roof in the first week.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#317

Post by quattrofan »

I went down this path myself, the company I was with in California went under and I had ended up consulting, COBRA runs out after 6 mos so I decided to buy some health insurance and I got denied. The reason being that years previously I had "asked" a consultant about a procedure that I never actually went ahead with and that was in my records which they dug up.

I moved back to the UK and now enjoy the wonders of the NHS and this was one of the biggest reasons I left since I really didn't want to lose my house to pay medical bills if I got seriously ill.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#319

Post by jacoblyles »

jimbokun wrote: post #44
SandB0x wrote: post #32

I would have died at the age of 19 if it weren't for the help of the UK's National Health Service. My parents and I didn't have to worry about hospital bills, future insurance issues, being tied to a job, any of that crap. Just get some rest, get better, go out there and be productive again. The American system looks like a horrible joke from over here. I just can't understand any of it.

"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.

The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world. Health cost inflation is the number one problem with the US health care market. If care were cheaper, coverage would expand and costs would be less of a burden.

In my opinion, the "very minor reforms" you mentioned will probably accelerate health cost inflation by subsidizing more consumption of health care goods and offering no incentive for offsetting conservation. They may ease the symptoms for a time, but they will exacerbate the underlying illness.

Re: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

#320

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #80
Dramatize wrote: post #45

I'm glad we don't have these issues in Australia. The American healthcare system would be one of the only reasons not to move there to start a business.

Australia has a hybrid public/private system. You can rely on the public system for pretty much everything, but only catastrophic medical services are well-funded (and even then ...). Otherwise you will need to get used to waiting in a queue. Private health insurance then allows you to get the frills and to do so without waiting. If you have private cover and need surgery to treat a non life-threatening issue, then y…

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