Millions Paying 10k Plus inHealth Care Premiums and Remain Afraid

originally posted by: Logarock
a reply to: BomSquad


Hell yes. And insurance is supposed to be a barely noticeable cost to portect way of life and income. Not an 2nd house payment.

When the risk of catastrophe is remote, the cost is barely noticeable. On the other hand, it's virtually certain you're going to get sick... a lot. Therefore the cost is high. It's why insurance doesn't work for health care.

a reply to: Aazadan
You've got the talking points all down pat. Too bad you have no real world knowledge of the issue over the years. Now you're blaming the boomers? That is straight from Obama's playbook.
You may believe you're going to get sick---a lot---but that's because you're constantly reminded by the talking heads on tv that you are in danger of just that very thing and how many companies are wanting you to buy their pill so you won't be sick. Trouble is, the more of BigPharma's pills you take, the sicker you get, the more pills you need. Putting your health in the hands of anyone else is a bad choice. You health should be primarily your responsibility. No doctor can make you healthy and damned few of them even try.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Logarock
a reply to: BomSquad


Hell yes. And insurance is supposed to be a barely noticeable cost to portect way of life and income. Not an 2nd house payment.

When the risk of catastrophe is remote, the cost is barely noticeable. On the other hand, it's virtually certain you're going to get sick... a lot. Therefore the cost is high. It's why insurance doesn't work for health care.

This is why we should really only be insured against catastrophe and not against every cold or flu or broken bone we ever get like everyone today seems to think we should be. That's akin to getting car insurance for every oil change and house insurance for cleaning your gutters. If you demanded your auto and home insurance cover those things, see how expensive those types of insurance would get.

Interesting enough, it is absolutely certain that each of us will die, and yet life insurance (insurance against death) is pretty darn cheap unless you wait until a few years before you are likely to kick the bucket. Wonder why that is?

originally posted by: FissionSurplus
This is exactly correct. The ones who are crying about losing their insurance are the ones who are getting it for next to nothing. What about all the others who can barely afford premiums that went up astronomically? I could NOT ever afford insurance, because I have a pre-existing condition. $1400 per month for me. That's a huge mortgage payment! So I have no insurance.

I just hope that this isn't another "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it" moment. :/

What do you expect? The people who designed Obamacare (and the people who have been manipulating the healthcare market for decades) designed it this way on purpose. It's sabotage.

They couldn't sabotage the free market by going after something people can comfortably live without so they picked healthcare and focused everything on making their class warfare there where no one can refuse to participate.

a reply to: diggindirt

There isn't a person on Earth that's never been sick.

Excuse your conservative macho hyperbole, but the amount of people that get sick with no insurance because they "don't get sick" is a literal plague on our system.

Single-Payer is only pushed because of how expensive and not-responsible people that make those statements actually are.


Sure, in a perfect world you never get sick and insurance subsidies are stimulated magically.

But in reality, you will be sick at some point and probably dodge the bill for the rest of us to pay. That's just as likely a reality to us.

a reply to: LooksLocked

Really?

What do you mean by sick?

You think most people can't afford a $50-$75 office visit? Notice I am not talking about the truly poor, but they have Medicaid and always have, but most of the rest of us. If you can afford your iPhone, you can afford a $50 out of pocket office visit to the general practitioner for most routine illnesses and injuries.

And, sure, that means a few might have to *gasp* make a choice between their current monthly service plan and buying by the minute in order to make room for basic health care, but oh well, that's life and it's called responsibility. We should all take some for ourselves.

a reply to: LooksLocked

Where did I say there are people who don't get sick? The rest of your post is an answer to a post that didn't happen.

I get health care on a regular basis. I pay for that care when it is provided. It's not rocket science. It is being personally responsible and NOT expecting something for nothing. Paying as I go also makes the docs happy since they don't have to fill out a mountain of paperwork and wait 30-60 days to get paid nor do they have to consult with any third party to get permission to treat me.

originally posted by: ketsuko
This is why we should really only be insured against catastrophe and not against every cold or flu or broken bone we ever get like everyone today seems to think we should be. That's akin to getting car insurance for every oil change and house insurance for cleaning your gutters. If you demanded your auto and home insurance cover those things, see how expensive those types of insurance would get.

Interesting enough, it is absolutely certain that each of us will die, and yet life insurance (insurance against death) is pretty darn cheap unless you wait until a few years before you are likely to kick the bucket. Wonder why that is?

Even catastrophic care doesn't work though. It might cost $10,000 over 20 years to send someone to the doctor for checkups and screenings. It costs 1,000,000 to treat a serious condition. If even 1 in 100 serious conditions are prevented due to those screenings people are healthier, live longer, and have fewer doctor bills over their lives. That works out to everyones benefit. Therefore, in the name of preventing serious conditions, we need to treat the minor stuff too.

Other types of insurance don't work this way, either the catastrophic happens or it doesn't. You don't incrementally build up to a house fire, or a flood, or a car wreck.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: LooksLocked

Really?

What do you mean by sick?

You think most people can't afford a $50-$75 office visit? Notice I am not talking about the truly poor, but they have Medicaid and always have, but most of the rest of us. If you can afford your iPhone, you can afford a $50 out of pocket office visit to the general practitioner for most routine illnesses and injuries.

And, sure, that means a few might have to *gasp* make a choice between their current monthly service plan and buying by the minute in order to make room for basic health care, but oh well, that's life and it's called responsibility. We should all take some for ourselves.

Most people with good insurance are paying 5000$ out of pocket before insurance kicks in. Thats on top of 10k a year for insurance anyway. Where is your iPhone analogy in that?

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Logarock
a reply to: BomSquad


Hell yes. And insurance is supposed to be a barely noticeable cost to portect way of life and income. Not an 2nd house payment.

When the risk of catastrophe is remote, the cost is barely noticeable. On the other hand, it's virtually certain you're going to get sick... a lot. Therefore the cost is high. It's why insurance doesn't work for health care.

Its not just the insurance firms, its the health care for profit industry as a whole. At any rate Joe and Jane shouldn't be paying another house payment or more. Gasoline is expensive in a hurricane zone.......but its called price gouging there. The very real hard spike in insurance costs was due to government sh*t storm.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: diggindirt
a reply to: Aazadan
WOW!

I bow sir to your superior knowledge but for the record---there are still people out there who are broke and uninsured. There are far more people who are insured and broke because of it. Every cent they had in their budgets for savings is now going for insurance premiums. Their contributions to their retirement have been re-directed to the insurance companies. Can you not see how very wrong that is?

I can, if you read my other posts on the subject you'll see that I'm not pro health insurance. All I'm saying is that people often blame the ACA for things it's not responsible for. Health care in the US is screwed up, that's due to the insurance model though. By all metrics the ACA hasn't done anything good or bad, we would be in the same situation without it.

I have to disagree simply because I watch our insurance go from 300$ to 900$ within several years of its passage.

a reply to: Logarock

I was talking about sans having to fork over money for premiums.

If we worked with out of pocket or HSA and catastrophic, we could mostly work with $50 to $75 office visits, most of us.

How often do people actually get sick enough to need to see their doctors? Kids do it more than adults, but even then, I was usually only sick enough to need to see the doctor once, maybe twice a year growing up.

originally posted by: Logarock
I have to disagree simply because I watch our insurance go from 300$ to 900$ within several years of its passage.

Correlation does not imply causation.

originally posted by: ketsuko
How often do people actually get sick enough to need to see their doctors? Kids do it more than adults, but even then, I was usually only sick enough to need to see the doctor once, maybe twice a year growing up.

I've got 2 preexisting conditions, one requires a doctors visit every 3 months, the other every 6 months for checkups, tuning medical equipment, medication adjustments, etc... that's 6 visits a year right there. Then 2 dentist visits (ideally it would be 4, years of Ohio Medicaid not covering dental checkups has left me with bad teeth), an annual checkup, and then getting very sick maybe once a year or once every 2 years. That's 10 doctors visits a year for a pretty basic level of care.

The problem with HSA's is that pre tax dollars just don't mean much in some areas. I've been lucky enough in the past few months to where I've started making pretty good money. I'm still paying an effective tax rate of about 15% though. So in effect an HSA is only providing me with a 15% discount on expenses.

On top of that, the benefit for an HSA is highly questionable. The main idea is that I'm going to put money into an HSA and use it to cover doctors visits. This is pretty good for high income folks, low and medium income people don't see anywhere near the same benefit though. The numbers I've seen on these plans generally aim for 10% of income (and in practice it will be less, if the average 401k savings are any metric to go by). If you're making $52,000 per year, which is the median income, that leaves you with $5,200 in your HSA. Chances are, you'll pay your catastrophic premium out of the HSA, which is around $1200 per year (I'm guessing). That leaves you with $4,000. Catastrophic plans generally have rather high deductibles, lets say $20,000, that's 5 years of savings.

That would be a reasonable situation but it's leaving out a lot of factors such as what a typical budget looks like these days, what happens if you get sick before you have enough in savings, what happens with pre existing conditions, what happens to the people who ignore insurance, and have a change of heart when they realize access to health care would let them live, and what happens to people at lower income.

Lets look at a few of those:
1. Budget shortfalls - This is rare, but it does happen. Do we make a fund for them? Do we let HSA's carry a negative balance?

2. Preexisting conditions - People like me are never going to get affordable coverage. If you live long enough, you'll wind up with something, it's only a matter of when. I see it as quite an affront to the idea of life and liberty that if I want to survive I'm contractually obligated to a single company. No competition would ever be possible, because pre existing conditions would prevent me from ever getting a new contract with another provider. Therefore I'm obligated to pay the same company regardless of market conditions. That's a worse situation than even the people who choose to take an ACA fine. At least they can switch (currently) if market conditions improve.

3. People who skip insurance - Should we be condeming people to death for making a poor health choice? Personally, I don't want to live in a country that has the ability to provide care but chooses to withhold it because someone chose to not buy insurance 10 years earlier. This is another example of why insurance doesn't work. It's typically a 40-50 year commitment before it pays off, but people make financial decisions on much shorter timetables than that. Sometimes people rationalize that they need to eat today, and they can deal with the problems 50 years from now sometime in the future. We shouldn't screw these people over, and that means we have to recognize that most of them won't be able to pay. A consequence of this, is that it means people in the present won't buy insurance either in order to game the system. This is another example of why insurance is not a solution.

4. Last is lower income folks. Lets look at a realistic budget suggestion these days:
Housing - 24%
Utilities - 8%
Food - 14%
Clothing - 4%
Healthcare - 6%
Gifts - 4%
Savings - 9%
Entertainment - 5%
Transportation - 14%
Misc - 12%

So what this means, if you're making $20,000/year like 25% of the country is (well, 20k or less) then your suggested health care allotment is $1200 per year (easy to calculate, since we're assuming this all goes to an HSA and dodges taxes). In that case, all you'll get is a catastrophic plan, and never build any savings. With no preventative care, you'll get sick sooner, have a lower quality of life, die earlier, and accrue massive debt trying to reach your deductable.

Now for the 52,000/year person. They get $3120 per year for health care. That's about $1900/year in savings. Meeting a 10 year deductible will therefore take 10 years... if you're single. If you're a family with a spouse and two kids, an HSA won't cover enough to take care of your family, even with both parents working (case in point $52k is median household).

HSA's at suggested budget amounts don't cover a typical budget today, and those budgets are noticably lacking in savings percenteges (9% savings will not cover investments, short term funds, and long term funds), assume you'll never need to buy a new car, doesn't build for a house down payment, and will never put you at financial independence. All while leaving you sick as well.

The bottom line is, HSA's are good for one very specific group: Well off people, in high tax brackets or high tax cities/states who want a tax shelter. It's effectively a tax deduction for money they were going to spend anyways. For everyone else, HSA's are simply incapable of covering even basic medical needs, especially for families. To make them even worse, that tax deduction has to be made up by others lower on the income scale because the revenue doesn't just disappear.

originally posted by: diggindirt
a reply to: LooksLocked

Where did I say there are people who don't get sick?

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: LooksLocked

Really?

What do you mean by sick?

You think most people can't afford a $50-$75 office visit? Notice I am not talking about the truly poor, but they have Medicaid and always have, but most of the rest of us. If you can afford your iPhone, you can afford a $50 out of pocket office visit to the general practitioner for most routine illnesses and injuries.

And, sure, that means a few might have to *gasp* make a choice between their current monthly service plan and buying by the minute in order to make room for basic health care, but oh well, that's life and it's called responsibility. We should all take some for ourselves.

This is all semantics. It's a simple train of logic. Everyone gets sick, so everyone should be insured, despite whatever perceived ability for people to 'care for themselves' is only left irresponsibility and disaster. If everyone should be insured, inspecting subsidy pool between private and single payer is a no-brainer, if everyone is to be insured, it should be single payer. Private Insurance is an argument that some people don't deserve healthcare. You casually call your 'options' responsibility and freedom, but it's the opposite, as the mathematical consequence of multiple pool subsidy is a less strong spending power per dollar overall, thus less healthcare for all, overall.

The system exists only to profit the super-rich. You can say I'm crying wolf, my single piece evidence is they are the largest single industry in the world, and they literally have no product other than collecting money.

You've been brain washed into thinking supporting Big Insurance is intelligent. It's the opposite. Because math.

That being said, AGAIN, the consistent issue is Insurance, not ObamaCare.

Trump could literally create single payer Trump-surance without touching ObamaCare and fix it.
There, everyone has a President Party name in our damned infrastructure, happy?

The largest disassociation is that HEALTHCARE and INSURANCE are the SAME THING ?

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Obviously ObamaCare is expensive, it's not a total SCAM like insurance, that only makes money(from nothing).

This is becoming as stupid as the banks itself.

a reply to: LooksLocked

I'm not the one who has been brainwashed into giving private insurance companies my money to go toward their profits. I have excellent health care. When I get health care I pay my doc. I'm happy. He's happy. My health care is none of your business nor the government's business.
Here's the difference---I'm healthy and I do everything in my power to stay that way. I don't depend on a doctor to get or keep me healthy. I have enough basic training and common sense to know how to maintain a healthy life style. More importantly, I know that taking pills isn't the route to a healthy life. It's a route to taking more pills to counteract the "side effects" of the first round of pills---because that is the mainstream medical model. They don't want you healthy because their profits would drop dramatically.
But you have learned the talking points quite well---too bad they don't reflect reality.

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: Logarock
I have to disagree simply because I watch our insurance go from 300$ to 900$ within several years of its passage.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Well its not like its two unrelated issues that correlate.

a reply to: Aazadan

Unfortunately, for every 1 person those "screenings" do help by finding a real problem, there are a hundred who end up with batteries of expensive tests for what turns out to be a non-problem, treatment for what turns out to be a non-problems, complications due to those other tests and treatments for non-problems, etc. It's especially a problem with PSA tests, mammograms, and thyroid cancer screenings.

originally posted by: Logarock
Well its not like its two unrelated issues that correlate.

There was already an exponential growth in premium increases before the ACA though. Most studies agree that the ACA slowed the rate of increase.

Ironically, we probably are seeing $2500 savings due to it.