Should I Throw Up Now Or Later?

I know how you feel
My premiums for family is $500 a month and haven't gotten the packet yet for next year. My husband now having cancer will be using it alot. I also use it a lot because I have bipolar and my son uses it alot because he has adhd and anxiety. So I think we get alot for our money but it's the copays that kill me. I can spend $65 for one precription. But there is nothing I can do about any of it. So why get upset.

Good luck.

Michele

Should You Throw Up Now Or Later?
Which will cost you less?
Thank God the cost will come down in March.

tommycat said:

It's sickening isn't it?
It's sickening isn't it? Greed greed greed and more (rampant) greed while people suffer.

I'm with you
99% of the way...
Why are people mad I wonder???
;-)

Buckwirth said:

Wolfen,
In 2008 I found my wife had saved my pay stubs from the beginning of the Bush administration (this is not a political gibe, just an observation) to the time my company went paperless.

Over the course of time I noticed an odd thing; as my taxes went down, my healthcare went up. For about three years it was almost dollar for dollar, so my net pay remained about the same.

Since I stopped working about a month ago we are now on COBRA. My wife gets Medicare (long story, but she was disabled by a chiropractor in 1995), and the cost of just me on COBRA is less than 1/2 of the two of us combined so I figured we could save money by getting her on an Advantage plan. Well, after running all of her meds and doctors through the calculators, it turned out to be cheaper to keep her on my insurance.

What does it cost? I had a pretty good plan, an HSA with a family deductible of $1,250 and an annual max spend of $5,000 and our monthly premium is $1,076. Total annual spend is somewhere around $18k

Of course, my former employers open enrollment is in March, so I can expect those number to go up, and we may be revisiting the Advantage option for April...

One last note, I now have a schedule for throwing up: Every other week, starting on Friday night and finishing sometime on Saturday. :-)

Hope you are well,

Blake

Change of heart
I gritched and grumbled all the time about the amount we were paying for health insurance when Jake and I were healthy and had fewer medical expenses than our premium for one month. This year we began paying $850 a month for the two of us which is a lot on our retired income. But it had a small deductible, $500 for each of us I believe, and $2000 out of pocket per year. We pay $5 copay for prescriptions.

WELL, now that Jake has cancer and I see the vast amounts of money that our insurance company is paying out--$22000 for one infusion every two weeks--plus miscellaneous other expenses, I am almost feeling sorry for the insurance company. Or at least for all of the people who have paid money into the insurance company. This year the insurance company will have paid out more for Jake's treatment than we have paid in premiums for our whole lives.

I worry about how this will be possible to sustain as a country. Jake's expenses I am sure will top $1 million before we are finished. That isn't even taking into account any health needs I may have in the future. How can this work? And I can't blame the insurance company for this. They definitely are not making a profit on us. I have to look primarily at the pharmaceutical companies. There is where the vast majority of our expenses lie.

Sure we have wonderful health care in this country but how can we afford to use it? Something has to change.

slow meltdown, and a barf bag
These insurance increases are an early symptom of why more medical self reliance and health preservation are going to become necessities.

There is not enough money in the world for too many medical answers that are wrong headed - no cure, no limit to expenses. Marginal, chronic new treatments with unlimited price tags. New treatments with hidden side effects. Limited user accountability with nearly unlimited coverage. This was/is a formula for economic meltdown. An aging population. I don't count too much on Medicare, from our family experience with Medicare nursing homes, they seemed to be on the path toward the German T4 program, got one, almost a second. The retirees that I have lunch with 1-2x per week already grouse about how very few doctors locally take Medicare and are available at all.

I've repeatedly found that there are cheaper and better answers than what's being touted as "current medicine". Some are old. Some are "alternative" or both. At some point the failures and disconnects can be so bad that conventional medical insurance is not feasible. Forced insurance can be a symptom of such a situation generalized.

What are the rays of hope? Generic medicines like 90 days for $10. Natural medicines, (super)nutrition and nutrigenomics. Self education and self reliance. Community, local and on the internet. Computerization, home and self testing. The internet, for education and personal telemedicine. Medical outsourcing.

I'm sure medical costs can be reduced 80% even 90% (I think we're at 95%, with some advantages). We individually have to take responsibility, and reclaim it as a matter of freedom. The current US system makes it easy to compromise or surrender that, and increasingly demands it.