Repeal Obamacare, go back to HSAs. Nobody should be taxed on health expenses, which was the whole point of HSAs in the first place. We literally had a budding system that was working and affordable, and it was "fixed".
If we repeal ACA, we'll need to force insurers to take on patients with preexisting conditions. We can't ice out 38% of Americans[0] from coverage. [0]: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
51–60 of 198 posts
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#52Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#53It is not largely health insurance, it is medical treatment payment insurance, so I usually just call it medical insurance.
We are not paying so much money for promotion of or preservation of health, or even early detection of disease. We are paying so much for late medical treatment of disease
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#54So my health insurance is healthy living, CrossFit, rapamycin etc. When that fails, I have a 9mm pistol I keep in the safe. I do worry about if I am somehow too incapacitated to use the pistol but not enough to die naturally. Infirmity scares me a lot more then death does.
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#55Looking from outside your system is scary. I don't get how anyone could defend it in earnest.
What they would defend is the premise of returning value to shareholders. And of course, that's what most for-profit healthcare and insurance companies are set up to do. The largest shareholders are typically retirement and pension funds.
That can be applied to almost anything, of course, but if you look at the "enshittification" of most markets in the United States, you'll notice that the process began in earnest around the time that the Baby Boomers began to retire. The Boomers, mathematically speaking, did not have enough children to sustain increasing returns on investments through market expansion. When you have fewer people to extract wealth from, you have to extract more from the average person in order to keep up the numbers, and that's ultimately what we see here and across many sectors of the US economy. You have a generation that was told they would have as good of a retirement as their parents' generation, while also being told that they didn't need to produce the human capital in order for that retirement to happen with the same margins as before.
The effect is a generation that gets their basic healthcare met by the taxpayer through Medicare, while getting their retirement checks paid for by their children being squeezed on everything from real estate to healthcare to transportation costs. It's the tyranny of the gerontocracy.
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#56I just looked at the local marketplace plans. The absolute dirt-cheapest I could do for my family is ~$1,225/month premium with a deductible of $13,400 and out-of-pocket max of $21,200. Most of the structure is some form of "zero help until the deductible, then I pay 20%-40% of everything up until the OOP max". In other words, I'm being asked to buy a product, and the cheapest form of it is to basically pay almost $1…
Now you have to account for taxes you pay in the U.S. for medicare, and a risk-adjusted share of the deductible payments, but overall it doesn't seem that crazy.
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#57I just looked at the local marketplace plans. The absolute dirt-cheapest I could do for my family is ~$1,225/month premium with a deductible of $13,400 and out-of-pocket max of $21,200. Most of the structure is some form of "zero help until the deductible, then I pay 20%-40% of everything up until the OOP max". In other words, I'm being asked to buy a product, and the cheapest form of it is to basically pay almost $1…
So you have to pay like $30k out of pocket in a year before the insurance chips in a single dollar? And if you ever ask for a dollar, I can also reject your coverage. How can I start an insurance company?
EDIT: https://www.healthreformbeyondthebasics.org/wp-content/uploa...
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#58I just looked at the local marketplace plans. The absolute dirt-cheapest I could do for my family is ~$1,225/month premium with a deductible of $13,400 and out-of-pocket max of $21,200. Most of the structure is some form of "zero help until the deductible, then I pay 20%-40% of everything up until the OOP max". In other words, I'm being asked to buy a product, and the cheapest form of it is to basically pay almost $1…
You are not paying $15k to hedge against someone in your family getting cancer in a calendar year.
You are paying $15k to pay for old and sick people’s routine healthcare, due to the ACA’s requirement that the highest premium to be at most 3x the lowest premium, and the requirement that premiums be only a function of age and tobacco use (i.e. no underwriting for health risks by factoring in pre existing conditions).
So an ACA compliant health plan’s premiums are far more comparable to a tax than an insurance premium since they are explicitly a wealth transfer mechanism from young and healthy to old and sick.
New York state takes this wealth transfer even further and mandates that age not be used at all to price premiums. I think Massachusetts only allows an age rating factor of 2.
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#59I have been struggling to find the breakeven point for me and my family. On one side, it keeps getting more and more expensive even though we are young and healthy. On the other, if one of us needs an expensive operation or months of treatment, no amount of HSA savings will be enough. I don't know if there is a 3rd option that would be more reasonable.
Third option is pay what you can reasonably pay and file for bankruptcy. Which sucks, but is an option. Try to get assets into bankruptcy protected holdings when possible (401k, house, etc, depending on state of residence), so you have more flexibility post bankruptcy.
Re: Is Health Insurance Even Worth It Anymore?
#60Looking from outside your system is scary. I don't get how anyone could defend it in earnest.