My Health Insurance Plan

I am unemployed. I was laid off by the bank I worked at right after I got married and became the insurance provider for my wife. For 2 months we didn't have insurance, today we got our cards in the mail.

Here is what 400 dollars a month gets the two of us.

her birth control is a tier 1 drug. never mind the fact that generics exist. she has to pay the full price or up to 50 dollars. Most birth control drugs are on this tier.

I want a vasectomy, under my old plan, this would have cost me about 150 bucks out of pocket. This plan, however, requires that we pay a family deductible of 1500 dollars first. then 10% of what ever is left over. that's right. any trip to the doctor for non emergency visits costs us 1500 out of pocket before they will start covering 90%. This basically insures that we wont be going to any doctor other than the ER or urgent care.

I would get my own insurance since hers sucks, but guess what!?!?! I have broken my right knee, tendentious in my left knee, PTSD, bipolar 1 disorder, I HAD chronic bronchitis before I quit smoking, thalassemia beta (red blood cell disorder), and a family history of cancer.

guess who is UN-insurable????? I AM!!!!!!!

so, thank you to all the republicans who acted like nearsighted mohels with the health care bill (never mind that's what the majority wanted). thank you to all the democrats who let the republicans piss all over your constituency's wishes even though you control both houses and the executive (you won the election, act like it!) and the health insurance companies who rewrote the bill to make them more money!

sure, in the near future everybody will have health care, but it will be because we are forced to buy coverage from companies that do everything they can to insure, not us, but the fact that we will never visit the doctor or buy any drugs. Because after paying 400 a month in premiums to them, we just can't afford the deductible that is the same price I paid when I was uninsured and had pneumonia a few years ago.

I can't afford to go to the doctor so I get insurance so that I can go to the doctor, but because of the price of the insurance I can't afford to go to the doctor.

The Myth of Health Insurance

The Therapeutic State: The Myth of Health Insurance

40 millions American are said to have no health insurance. Those who do have health insurance are frustrated by having to pay ever-increasing premiums for steadily diminishing medical services. Conventional wisdom tells us that we are facing a “health insurance crisis.”

It is important to recognize that what we call “health insurance” has little to do with health and nothing to do with insurance. We do not face a “health insurance crisis.” We face the consequences of a set of economic and social problems rooted in a futile effort to make the distribution of health care—unlike the distribution of virtually every other good and service in our society—egalitarian.

The typical contractor of homeowner’s insurance is the homeowner. He buys insurance to protect himself from costly loss caused by events outside his control, such as fire, not to defray the recurring expense of maintaining it. The ideal outcome for both the buyer and the seller of home and automobile insurance is for the policyholder to never make use of his policy.

The typical contractor of health insurance is not the insured person but his employer. Neither party is free to negotiate the terms of the policy. The employee cannot bargain for a lower premium in exchange for a high deductible or for choosing to be not covered for alcoholism or schizophrenia. The employer is not free to decline coverage for state-mandated medical services. In New York State, for example, the Women’s Wellness Act mandates group health-insurance plans to cover contraceptives including abortifacients, and the Infertility Coverage Act mandates that they cover infertility treatments, including selective fetal reduction (abortion of multiple fetuses conceived by artificial means).

The economic survival of an insurance company depends in large part on collecting more in premiums than it pays out in claims. To bring about that outcome the insurer employs certain methods, some complicated, some very simple. Although embarrassingly obvious, some of these simple measures need to be mentioned because they are absent from what we mislabel “health insurance.” For example, a person cannot buy a policy to protect himself from a loss caused by his own actions, such as burning down his own home. But so-called health insurance protects the individual from the medical consequences of his own actions, for example, injuring himself by smashing his car while drunk. Not surprisingly, all the participants in the complex scheme we call “health insurance” are unhappy with the result.

In the case of genuine insurance, there is a direct relationship between the dollar value of the protection purchased and its cost to the insured. The premium for a life-insurance policy with a face value of $100,000 is less than for a policy for a multiple of that amount. In health insurance no such relationship exists between premium paid and compensation received.

Moreover, the health-insurance company, acting on its own behalf, can write a contract with a “cap” on claims, that is, for the maximum amount it will pay the insured, regardless of the health-care cost he incurs. The insured person, who typically does not act on his own behalf but is “provided” insurance as an important part of his job benefit, has no reciprocal options.

The sole rational purpose of true insurance is to protect the insured from an unanticipated economic loss so large as to jeopardize his economic well-being. No one sells or buys insurance to cover the cost of maintaining his property. Home insurance does not pay for plumbing repairs; automobile insurance does not pay for replacing worn-out windshield wipers. Yet people demand precisely this kind of reimbursement from so-called health insurance.