OT: Health insurance premiums (self-employed)

I am presently using IEEE for some additional life insurance for me and my wife. Was a lot cheaper than the other term life plans I looked at!

Charlie

PS: I am presently shifting from Kaiser to United Healthcare. It was just too hard to get an appointment when you needed one...

Hmm, that's the one thing we never had an issue with. Haven't used it a lot but others said the same. Very easy online: Pick your doctor, look which slots are open and then within three minutes after selecting on click on submit. The last one was at 9:40am. The door magic door swung open at niner hours, forty minutes and about zero seconds...

You have to be careful with those HSAs though. If you don't use them, you lose them! I have the problem that I put in $2000 for this year, and haven't used but about $500. I usually have more than enough for claims, but one thing I used to use it for was an occasional massage from a physical therapist I knew. Unfortunately, we move out of town, and they don't cover mesaage, just physical therapy, so that was a large expense not covered. Now, they are giving me fits because I am getting a mole removed, and they are calling it 'cosmetic surgery' because they have to cover it if it is medically necessary...

Charlie

They just opened new facilities out here in the desert, with new offices in Palm Springs, Palm Desert and Indio. Before that, they used local doctors. So, for about 2 months, they were scheduling new appointments only for the new facilities that weren't open yet, so we had to wait about 3 months just for a physical. They evidently have a huge backlog and large client list out here, so it typically takes 3-4 weeks to get a standard appointment, and even longer if you need a specialist. Since they don't have any of their own specialists out here, they go outside for them, so add a week for them to do their paperwork...

Charlie

With Kaiser you need to live within driving distance of one of their hospitals, otherwise it doesn't make much sense. They used to be the best deal in town in terms of rates but that seems to have changed :-(

What you wrote about HSA is disturbing. I didn't know you were so restricted in usage and I thought they did away with the bane of the corporate HSAs where it was "use it by year end or lose it". Maybe not such a good thing for me because I don't want to get into the habit of having to blow away my own money just because I locked it up in that.

You've got the wrong doctor/insurance. Even State Farm paid for removal of hard spots on the backs of my hands... the doctor had labeled them as "pre-cancerous subcutaneous horns".

...Jim Thompson

I would suggest moving to Canada! Nice and spacious, clean air, clean water, and universal health care. Lots of people complain about the health care here (as I'm sure lots of Americans complain about the lack of it) but in my experience it is fair.

You're not going to get the MRI tomorrow morning (unless you're in immediate danger) like you would with a upper-end policy in the US. But I've gotten everything I need. I've had to endure waits of 3-4 hours when all I had (it turns out) was a strained wrist while someone who got shot had surgery (that's rare for our area). I don't mind that. When I had a head injury from baseball I went to the front of the line and was in and out in 1/2 hour.

Again, the coverage won't match upper-end private policies in the US but its good and everything you need. If you want something beyond that you can always add that as well. For full dental, vision, and drug plan and a lot of extras for hospital stays would be ~$225/month. I'm still considering it. I have barely paid $200 for any year for my whole family (of what would be covered) so I'm trying to figure out if its worth it. But now I have 2 kids and one on the way so that changes things a bit.

Cheers,

James.

This is a recent development (since 2006), not just for the lower incomes. I guess subsidies still flow however.

Thomas

... snip ...

No, but then they send a bill to the victim, and if they can't pay it they attach their house and throw them out. There was a large stink about that practice about two years ago in New Haven, CT. Yale-New Haven hospital also wanted to collect the full bill, which is always overblown, as evidenced from their happily accepting the Medicare controlled payments. Those may be as little as 25% of the original bill. And this is a teaching hospital!

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:22:03 GMT, Joerg wrote:

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testing

It read like that to me, too. But I also live here, so I knew better. I just wanted to make it clear.

I thought so, as well. But the campaign against the measure (voting 'no' meant that the insurance companies could continue their existing practice of using credit scores) was very well funded and advertised almost constantly.

I don't know the details of the funding, but large contributors must be recorded at the State of Oregon offices in Salem and they can be accessed if someone wants to visit there. Last time I did this was in the case of the Oregon lottery (two measures required -- one that modified our state constitution to allow it, another to implement it if allowed) for the November 1984 election cycle. (This was the first election cycle after the Oregon Supreme Court invalidated an existing Oregon law banning paying for signatures -- in other words, after the decision it was possible to pay signature gatherers for signature gathering and this meant that corporations could actually now pay people to push their interests for them and thus began the era of corporate ballot measures in the state [before this, because they went unpaid, a gatherer really had to want the measure themselves.]) In that case, there was a single contribution to "Oregonians for Economic Recovery," which was a 'shill' for "Scientific Games" in Georgia, which stood to benefit in supplying the equipment we'd need if the measures passed. The amount was $67,000, if memory serves. And it netted a multi-million dollar contract for Scientific Games, Inc. Good investment, I suppose. But one thing I learned in the process was that I couldn't just ask by phone. They required me to go down to Salem and walk in and ask. Personally. So I did. It was an interesting experience to go through and I really had no idea what I'd find, except that I knew the idea of the lottery 'seemed' to be somehow funded well in terms of gathering signatures and I was wondering why. The results of finding out allowed me to understand.

My guess is that there would be some interesting information uncovered in looking into this case. However, more than 20 years have transpired in the interim and funding sources are far smarter about the old Oregon requirements for disclosure and have had a lot of time to adjust their methods to obfuscate things or modify existing law or both. I don't imagine it would be an easy digging process, these days. Not as easy as it was, anyway.

My guess would be that the insurance companies pretty much funded the campaign against the measure, though. By the way, the ads tried to pump up fear about such a change and didn't really discuss details -- as few do, I suppose. It was just a matter of "Boy, are you tax payers really going to get hurt bad if you dare make this change because the insurance companies will hit business and gov't big time and you better watch out!"

Oregon does NOT, in my opinion, do much by way of having good watch dog agencies looking out for consumer protection here. Washington state, by comparison, does. We used to have usury laws here, but they were completely done away with in the early 1980's. Washington still limits the max rate of interest charges, while Oregon permits figures well in excess of 500%/yr. Yes... 500%, not 50%. There is no limit. We discuss it and it may pass this next year, limiting things to something like 50% perhaps with some exceptions. But it isn't here yet. And similarly, when furniture companies go around trying to scam people regarding "going out of business" sales that aren't, Washington actually prosecutes. Here in Oregon, they are given a complete pass. One of the companies that operated here tried to operate that way in Washington and soon decided that they simply wouldn't do business in Washington, after a year or so trying their games there.

The reason I mention that is because I don't believe that the insurance commissioner's office does much for us. I may be wrong, but I don't have any reason to believe it is an effective organization looking out for us based on my other experiences here (with real estate law [or lack of] and other consumer protections [their lacks].) So perhaps the insurance companies really would have used this measure as an excuse to really 'stick it to them and make them feel the pain' without any actual recourse taken at the state level. Who knows?

Anyway, there it is for what it is worth. (By the way, I've lived here my entire life and remember the days when I could take a jar and dip it aimlessly into a stream with dozens of pollywogs coming up -- population was under a million, then. I love this state. I've just been disabused of my prior Pollyanna view of its politics by actually having been active in it for some years.)

Jon

Bingo!! That was exactly my take on them when I first heard about them and folks were pushing them onto me. They are great if you can predict the bulk of your expenses. This means if you are in serious need already and are a consistent consumer of medical services, you can project a decent 'baseline' expense and go with that. If you are healthy, but still a consistent visitor of doctors more as a matter of routine than need, once again you can make some useful predictions. Otherwise, if you are just the occasional user and generally healthy so that some years your use will be almost nill, for example, then these things are .. more difficult to manage well.

That's new to me. You can't control what expenses are covered by money you put into the account?? I suppose that makes ..some.. sense, because some folks would say that a vacation trip to Puerto Vallarta is for their 'health.' But it would seem that removing a mole would qualify.

Jon

How aggressive are they at collecting the costs, say if the uninsured person ends up needing a triple-bypass operation costing, say, $100,000? Do they end up losing all their assets? Pay garnisheed for years?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I _have_ United Healthcare and I'd jump ship in a split second to our local Kaiser system if my arrangements permitted it. United Healthcare is not my better experience, having had some frustrating times with them, but I suppose they also haven't made me hate them just yet. Just mad enough that I don't have any loyalties to them. But I've been through worse experiences with insurance. Not much of an endorsement, I suppose. The reason for being willing to jump to Kaiser is mostly that up here in the Portland, Oregon area they are pretty good, by comparison with United (I have several friends in almost identical situations to my own who have Kaiser and we talk about details, off and on.) They are local enough for me, too.

Jon

I think the doctors would have to be convinced you really were going to die in the next few hours or days -- and that a triple-bypass would significantly extend your life -- before they'd perform one on an uninsured individual.

I'm told that what usually happens is that you get the $100k bill and, after throwing up and crying, declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy lets you keep some assets (even many assets depending on the state you're in), so the average Joe will still typically have somewhere to live and their car. Ironically enough, if you lost your job due to your medical problems (that we'll assume are now taken care of), getting a new job can be much harder since many companies now look at the credit reports of applicants (even when the job doesn't involve, e.g., handling money!) and of course your credit is trashed. But ironically enough #2, it can actually be easier to get a credit card immediately after bankruptcy than beforehand, since you can't declare bankruptcy again for something like 7 years!

Meanwhile, the hospital writes off the debt, but of course some funds need to be made up, so everyone else's health care bills rise... especially those who are uninsured.

Bizarre world (well, country) that we live in...

If it makes you feel any better, and I suppose it won't, (: at least you don't have to pay for all your employees as well like me...

So for emergency care at least, you get the treatment first, and the financial questions later. I guess that makes sense, at least most of the time, although I'm sure there are those who wake up in hospital after a heart attack and wonder whether it would have been better to have died and left a little inheritance for their kids, rather than living with a large debt.

However, what about non-emergency care? In Europe, many countries have trouble with long delays before non-emergency treatment, but it's freely available to everyone. If you, as an uninsured American (citizen, or legal tax-paying foreign resident), get a hip problem - can you get financial help for a replacement hip, or do you have to pay the entire cost yourself?

$590/mo for two ppl in (upstate) NY, $4500 deductible. OTOH, we're doing our bit - cancer and sz.

Well, people voted for it so they can bluddy well suffer for it too ;-)

"The System" is basically a Ponzi scheme: You do NOT get anything back; you get a part of whatever people pay in now in the (probably vain) hope of getting something back when their time comes.

testing

The "Equinine Premium Health Plan", .... under "B", in the index of treatments covered, we will find:

Bad Heart: Shoot, Broken Leg: Shoot, Broken Nail: Shoot,

After all, the Dutch allow Euthanasia.