and on healthcare

[dragonlady7]

Am I bored today? I must be, I'm reading Artvoice. Just kidding.
Here's another gem of omg-wow-that's-my-life:
On Healthcare

Yesterday at work, we all received the annual “bad news” envelope. Enclosed was the memo stating that next year our company’s healthcare premium would increase by 21 percent! How is this possible? With all the handwringing about healthcare costs being out of sight, hospital closings, consolidations and increased co-pays, how in the world could it jump that much? This means that even with my employer contributing to the plan, I will pay in excess of $7,000 next year to cover my wife, my daughter and myself. Now, the average household income in the Buffalo area is approximately $37,000, and many of my co-workers make this amount or less. When I ask them how they can afford to spend almost 20 percent of their income on healthcare, I found that many of them don’t. With mortgage and car payments, utilities, food and other necessities, they can’t afford the luxury of our company’s healthcare plan. These are conscientious, intelligent family men that need to forego an essential component of safeguarding their families because of cost. It’s not an “option that they have elected not to pursue,” as I have heard stated repeatedly by those who like the system as it presently exists. Just because a healthcare plan is made available to employees doesn’t automatically make it possible for them to participate.

Comments

[debg.livejournal.com]

We're on COBRA; the monthly for my husband and myself right now is $605. January 1, it jumps to $670. When the COBRA runs out (it only lasts 18 months), we'll have to convert to individual plans, and that's going to run about $900 a month.

COBRA = unemployed. Right now, paying over $8K a year, and we're unemployed. It's jumping in January. And we have no option to not have coverage. I've got multiple sclerosis, my husband is a diabetic.

There are days when my country makes me want to puke.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

The number of people for whom affordable health care is not an issue is shrinking and shrinking.

Unfortunately, that tiny number still includes the people in power.

I hate to wish ill on anyone but I just wish a Congressman's twentysomething kid would get booted off the family healthcare plan and come down with some heinous terminal illness and be denied coverage.

Have you seen the news stories about that poor horribly-burned Iraqi five-year-old that's come to the US to get medical treatment for his horribly-scarred face? I read the article online and was all, you know, how heartwarming, etc. (as I was supposed to feel, naturally), and the first user-posted comment on the article was:
"The really tragic thing is that if this happened to an American five-year-old whose family had no insurance, he would not have access to this level of care."
True.
Depressing.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

Not true.
1. The specialist hospitals for children with major issues (cancer, burns, etc.) advertise widely that they will take care of every kid regardless of their family's ability to pay.
2. Children can get government coverage even if their parents are not eligible, due to income or whatever.

It's after you become an adult that healthcare vanishes.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Good.

Not that that helps me, but, it's reassuring, as the thought depressed me thoroughly.

[soulofbuffalo.livejournal.com]

My work has found an interesting way to deal with this that works for me but wouldn't for a lot of other people -- when the decent insurance went way up in price we switched to a crappier one. So the amount I'm paying hasn't skyrocketed. I just have less coverage! Woo.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Heh, Z's workplace did both-- "Here, the old one's too expensive now. Here's a new one that's still more expensive than the old one was, but offers far fewer options."
Oh JOY!!
Almost the same thing happened here. The new one they got this year is more expensive than the one from last year, though not by much; the one from last year is now priced out of reach, and the new one offers, you guessed it, far fewer benefits.

Z let his payments lapse. He says if he has any upcoming medical costs he's going to compare the overdue-payment bill with the medical bill, and pay whichever is smaller. (I've warned him not to forget about co-pays, which have gotten to the point now that I've started wondering whether some procedures would be cheaper if you just paid full price. My coworker's sister nearly lost the use of her hand when she waited over 12 hours to go to her doctor rather than the emergency room, because she couldn't afford the higher emergency-room co-pay. She was passing out repeatedly from the pain, but refused to go in.)

My favorite "reduced benefit" are the plans that just stop paying if your expenses get over like $5k. Those are great, because it makes absolutely no sense for you to even buy the damn thing, so it doesn't even occur to you to understand what the fine print says. "You have cancer? Great! You've paid us $5k in premiums this year, so we'll give you that $5k back, but beyond that, you're on your own for the other $15k that the first round of chemo will cost, and nobody will ever give you insurance again because you've had cancer now!"

It's a goddamn racket I wish I could get a piece of.

[soulofbuffalo.livejournal.com]

If one of you worked for a bigger company (or the government!), the marriage conversation and the health care conversation would tie in nicely. Get married at City Hall, get on the better of your two insurance plans, costs drop, you're all set!

Don't think I haven't thought about it. My boyfriend is a college professor and while I haven't gone over his health insurance info you can bet they're taken care of.

[jennnlee.livejournal.com]

Get married at City Hall, get on the better of your two insurance plans, costs drop, you're all set!

Not necessarily. Most larger companies I've worked for charges a LOT more for family coverage, or employee+ spouse coverage, than for just single person coverage. When we both worked for larger companies, we each had our own health insurance and paid some ridiculously low amount. It was multiple times cheaper to do it that way than to drop one and both be on the same plan.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

i've considered that too. If either of our companies offered reasonable family coverage, I'd go for that, but, so far, that's never happened.

[jennnlee.livejournal.com]

I've started wondering whether some procedures would be cheaper if you just paid full price.

One thing to keep in mind there is that, co-pays aside, having insurance means the procedure could be cheaper than if you walked in with no health insurance. My company moved to a high deductible insurance plan, which means I pay for doctor visits (no copay) till I've met the deductible. But the amount I pay is still a discounted, negotiated rate that's lower than it would be if I were on no insurance at all.

My work also has separate "cancer insurance" for exactly what you mentioned above. I haven't elected to use it, but I'm thinking about it.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I also keep in mind an experience I had when just out of college.
Z and I both got tonsilitis. It was bad. One morning Z could hardly breathe. I made him go to the emergency room. They gave him some kind of intramuscular injection, antibiotics that made him throw up immediately, etc. The bill came to $1000. His co-pay was $100. He paid it.
The next week, my tonsilitis was just as bad. I drove myself to the same emergency room, unable to speak except to croak out, "I have no insurance." They had me fill out an application for a reduced fee thing they could do through medicare or some organization like that.
Mine was so bad they had to take x-rays to make sure I didn't have an abscess, as my pain was unusually acute.
Then they gave me 600 MG ibuprofin tablets and coached me through swallowing it, and gave me the cheapest pennicilin-based antibiotics they could.
My total bill came to $200.
And my application for a reduced fee hadn't even been OK'd. (I had no proof of residence.)

[jennnlee.livejournal.com]

Dang, that's a cheap ER visit. I had to go there once for *ahem* female problems, and it was pretty much an ultrasound and exam, and I paid that sucker off at 50 bucks a month for almost two years.

[buschibaby.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell. God bless the NHS.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Smug bastard.

[buschibaby.livejournal.com]

We're heading towards a similar system to yours if we're not careful, so I'm going to be smug for as long as I can. There's already a fairly visible two-tier system, with those who can afford private healthcare being treated faster and better than those who rely on the NHS. It took me ten weeks to get what was supposed to be a two-week maximum suspected cancer referral (fortunatly it was just a bizarrely placed endometrial growth, fact-fans), and it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer had I not been an articulate English-speaker who bullied them every time they fucked up. The system's going down and it's an absolute tragedy.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Well, our system routinely denies claims for the hell of it, regardless of whether you can pay or not. I have an online friend who is in her forties and highly educated and articulate, and has migraines 9 days out of every 10. She recently tried a drug mostly used for nerve problems, and it cured her. She cannot get it covered by her insurance. She pays several hundred dollars a month for this insurance. She is, as she has pointed out herself, approximately as priveleged as one can get, being white, articulate, and rich, though not quite rich enough to afford the medication on her own.

And what do you think of the story of the 17-year-old girl who was denied a liver transplant because, while she'd die without it, with it she only had a 65% chance of survival? She died yesterday or the day before, and her family are suing the insurance company for manslaughter. Good fucking luck to them.

It's tiring to always have to be your own advocate, and it's something I'm terrible at. We worry that a system like the NHS wouldn't work, but we are confronted with the inescapable realization that a system like ours plain old doesn't, so personally, I'd take theoretical future failure over actual current failure any day.

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I am broke now in part because I paid some $500 a month in health care premiums while my daughter was in high school (my employer paid for me!). She became eligible for a low-cost health plan while a student at Hunter College $375 per month. More than her tuition and it did not cover prescriptions, birth control, or most commonly ordered lab costs (come to think of it, I am not sure what it did cover?). It was joke. (I have very little respect for this country!)

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

What about Healthy NY? It covers nothing, but at least it's $125 instead of $375. Except that, as I've found, the insurer doesn't give a shit about you if you're on Healthy NY, and will gleefully lose your fucking paperwork and just not pay you any attention. So it's pretty worthless too.

But it's all a joke, a fucking joke. Did you hear the one about the insurance company that denied a 17-year-old girl a liver transplant because, while she would certainly die without it, she only had a 65% chance of survival if she did get it, and they deemed that too poor a return on investment? So she died yesterday, and her parents are bringing a suit for manslaughter against the insurance company.