Salary is not really the issue, any more than it is for anyone else facing major medical costs. Either insurance (of some sort) pays for it, or it’s years to decades of income, even for the moderately well-off.
One of the ways that schools compensate for long hours and relatively shitty pay is with top-drawer benefits, which until the last decade were relatively cheap on a bulk basis and/or deferred long enough to be someone else’s problem (e.g., lavish retirement funds that depended on funding 20-50 years down the road). White would have have perfectly adequate insurance even on that modest salary, and his financial reserves would have been of small consequence.
We can fanwank a hundred reasons why Heisenberg came into being, but not being able to cope with costs of decent medical treatment is not in the mix - and it’s all but stated several times in the first two seasons that he has essentially “no coverage,” which is nonsense. It’s not a matter of collateral costs and co-pays and such minor things. He’s presented from the moment of his diagnosis as essentially uninsured, which is so contra-reality I have to put my fingers in my ears and go LA LA LA on each such scene lest it ruin the rest of the show for me.
Gilligan really could have found a more plausible basis for his financial crisis and built it in with a few lines of dialogue, even if it was fictive nonsense. (Maybe he waived medical insurance for higher salary, or such. Nonsense, but not as big as the nonsense that sits at the very genesis of the storyline.)
I think your point is a good one, but as with a few posters above I thought it was fairly clear that the genesis of the storyline was providing for his family after he kicks the bucket. The added money to pay for unnecessarily expensive treatment was more of an add-on ( a weak one, I grant you ).
WW’s money troubles was just one part in a larger picture of emasculation. He had nothing that he really felt good about. This is known, generally speaking, as mid-life crisis. He felt as though he had made all of the right moves, obeyed all of the rules, worked very hard, kept his temper in check, and generally was a good citizen. But, somehow, life just had not worked out for him.
Whether or not this is objectively true is another matter. The point is that he felt that this was true.
He did what he did in order to prove to himself that he was unjustly oppressed. He really was capable, powerful, deserving. He could achieve, by pure will power, whatever goal he wanted.
And your point is? This is established right in the OP. The whole rest of the thread is debating as to whether that’s realistic or not, and whether there’s some other explanation for the Whites’ financial situation and Walt’s decisions.
Not necessarily. It varies from district to district, but health insurance probably wouldn’t be fully paid for, and might not cover cancer treatments. In my district there is separate cancer policy available, but we have to pay extra for it. We pay a fairly small amount for a family policy, but that’s because my wife and I both work for the district and can apply our benefit toward the same policy. If it were just one of us working, I don’t see how we could afford the insurance without really scrimping, and even then we wouldn’t be able to afford the cancer policy.
Luckily we have an expert on Albuquerque public high school tenure and medical insurance who already weighed in that Walt having to work a second job was a bunch of unrealistic nonsense.
In Missouri, at least, tenure automatically attaches after a certain number of years with one district (five here). I think that’s pretty standard practice. A little googling seems to indicate that in New Mexico it’s three. So he’s probably tenured.
Although tenure generally has nothing to do with benefits, so it doesn’t particularly matter.
If Walt came into the program with a handicapped child in those pre-Obamacare days, the district’s insurance program may have handled it in one of three ways:
Refusing to cover Walt Jr. at all
Providing only minimal insurance with exceptions for anything cerebral palsy-related. That means nothing for therapy, no reimbursement for Jr.'s wheelchair or any other equipment, no coverage for any illness or medication they judge to be related to his CP (which they could easily claim is nearly** anything**.)
Astronomical premiums.
Having a special needs child can bankrupt (both figuratively and literally) families making a hell of a lot more that $47,000.
One of the reasons people choose certain kinds of employment, government and education being high among them, is that the benefits (which for most people translates to “healthcare coverage”) are generous to lavish. Until perhaps ten years ago, it was relatively cheap to maintain a group policy with very lush benefits. Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, when this situation was just starting to change. (I was an employer of 100 at the time and clearly recall the years in which coverage shrank and premiums skyrocketed.)
It is simply not likely that teachers in the ABQ school system had any real limits on their health insurance at all, not even for major pre-existing conditions. It just wasn’t done on big group policies, especially not for public-service employees. It was both still cost-effective for insurers to manage such blanket policies, and pretty much a sine qua non to get and hold employees, especially under relatively strong school and government unions, to have such “total” and complete coverage.
I can accept that WW’s motivation was to make a shit-ton of money to leave his family supported, and that healthcare costs were secondary issues, but I still feel that Vince Gilligan made too much of a fantasy issue out of the health insurance issue when he could have nailed down that part of the story with more believable alternatives.
Short form: The unbelievably ucked fup situation of healthcare was neither universal nor so extreme just a few years ago. From 1997 to about 2007-8, we had insurers competing heavily for our business and costs were in line with what I’d come to expect over 20+ years of various employment before that. It was not until 2008-9 that the costs started to rise 50% a year while coverage was cut to what we used to regard as “basic emergency plan” levels. So judging the White’s situation by the later part of era in which the show ran is to go down the wrong road. IMHO.
Your experience, your opinion. My wife was a teacher during that time, in a large district, with union representation, and our experience was different.
And surely you can’t argue with the fact that having a special needs child is expensive, regardless of how good one’s health insurance might be.
My wife has been a teacher for over 26 years. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve worked in a public school district for 10 years now. The benefits have never been anywhere near “lavish”, and the health insurance available has been adequate at best. Until we moved and I got a job with the same school district she was getting a single policy through work and I took out a single policy with two dependents to cover me and our girls because we simply couldn’t afford the family plan available through her work.
And yes, there were restrictions on pre-existing conditions. Because she’d been to see a fertility doctor one time the insurance offered through her school wouldn’t cover anything to do with her female parts for over a year. We had to pay for all of her gyno visits out of pocket.
My experience includes coming from a family of educators and government employees who worked all over the US from the late 1960s through the present day. (I’m the outlier who braved it out in the awful “private sector” without the comfy safety net of a unionized job.) But we’re not arguing reality here; we’re arguing whether the fictional situation was realistically constructed. I maintain that every element of the “we don’t have insurance for this” sub-plot was BS. Also unnecessary to any part of the plot development and easily handled by a more believable alternative. But on your screen, it’s your show; enjoy.
This thread keeps muddling up generalities about the White’s financial situation (which no one has yet disputed) with the specifics of whether or not he had health insurance that would have covered his needs. (IMVHO, he did, and Gilligan reached into absurdity to say otherwise.)
The plot was not that he didn’t have insurance. It was that he wanted to use a state of the art treatment (not simply the current standard of care) with a specific specialist.
I’ve known plenty of teachers who took second jobs, but it was usually in the summer, when school was out, not during the school year. I had one that wouldn’t shut up about how he delivered for Dominos.
What ongoing therapy is needed for CP? Junior seemed to be on the less effected side of the spectrum, I don’t remember him using anything but crutches which are a one time, or at least only every few years cost.
I don’t know why you keep pushing this. You’ve had two different people with direct experience during that time period tell you that it is plausible that with only a teacher’s salary and no other income Walter couldn’t afford adequate insurance. In 2003 we couldn’t afford what the school offered for a family policy even with two incomes.
At the risk of sounding like the vet in the old lightbulb joke, you weren’t there. kunilou and I were.
He isn’t poor. He’s an ordinary lower middle class person who could have had a happy life with his family and enough money to put food on the table, keep up his family’s 2 cars and backyard pool, and raise his children. The money was an excuse because he liked killing people and couldn’t be satisfied in his normal life. He turned down two offers from wealthy friends to pay for whatever his insurance didn’t cover. This is, like, the entire theme of the series. It’s a show about an evil human being who tells himself lies that he’s good, not a show about the specifics of health insurance in the U.S.
Well, maybe because it’s the point of this thread.
And because absolutely no one stands on argument by authority around here.
I haven’t disputed your situation or any other that’s been described.
But you weren’t everywhere, were you? What exactly gives you the idea that your situation is representative of the norm?
My opinion in this matter is based on what I think is probably much broader, deeper experience, both first- and immediate second-hand, than most people experience in normal careers. I have been a small-business employee, corporate employee, corporate officer, small business owner, middlin’-large business owner with a lot of employees, managed health plan selection at several levels (including participating in corporate plan selection), and am currently involved with the process for my town’s civic and school district budgets - which are overwhelmingly concerned with the costs of union- and market-driven healthcare costs. I am also from a family with a number of educators across the US and Canada and have been either directly affected by or privy to internal family discussions of healthcare coverage, costs and needs (including demanding special-needs issues).
I was there. I am there - and it’s a pretty big there. So until and unless someone comes up with definitive evidence that an established STEM teacher in ABQ in about 2007-8 would have had a healthcare plan not in the “very acceptable to lavish” category, as most such teachers in non-urban, non-economically-challenged cities did and mostly still do… I’ll politely maintain my position that Vince Gilligan’s handling of this plot point is stupid and contra-reality.