Yeah, that’ll work.
Ditto.
And the same for the overpayment. Maybe they’ll give me a credit over the phone, good for the next time I’m there.
15 minutes away is a half hour round trip and probably most of a gallon of gas; maybe more depending on what I’m driving. I’m not doing that in order to get two dollars back; I’d be behind on the deal.
For one thing, if it’s within 15 minutes, for me, it’s in or close to the nearest village. I might not have been heading back to that store soon, but I’m probably going to have to go somewhere right near it.
For another, see above about the gas cost. But it’s worth a phone call; the store might work something out.
– up until my late 60’s, I had paid out way more in health insurance than I’d ever used. I suspect I’ve used up that backlog by now, though, and am probably well on the other side of it.
Given a house-hunting redo, I’d spring for the perfect condition house vs the fixer upper. The main problem with fixer uppers is you’re really never done fixing them up; it’s like buying a second full-time job.
Hell, just a routine checkup can be hundreds of dollars. I require an annual echocardiogram, which can run into the thousands.
Anyone who’s paid more in health insurance than they otherwise would have paid for care must simply never go to the doctor.
I mean, I’d rather have a villa with fountains and pools overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Doesn’t that assume that your health insurance is heavily subsidized (e.g. by your employer)?
The insurance company isn’t going to pay out more money than they take in altogether. The way insurance normally works is that you pay a relatively small, regular amount in exchange for not having to cover a large, unexpected expense if one should arise. But that means that the majority of insured people are going to pay in more in insurance than they receive—it pretty much has to be that way, mathematically, to cover the people with extraordinarily large needs.
Same is true for fire insurance. You aren’t trying to get more then you paid it, you are hoping you don’t need it.
I was going back and forth on the question of whether I’ve recouped my health insurance premiums, and that was without including my employer’s portion. There’s also a question of how to calculate the costs, since uninsured patients are charged different amounts than what the insurance company has negotiated. But if I include my spouse’s premium/benefit ratio, we’ve definitely spent more than we paid by any metric.
As for the batteries, I like the idea of calling the store. I’m not spending over half an hour total to make a special trip to return them, definitely. Realistically, I’m going to put them on the table by the door to take back the next time I’m going that way. Then I’m going to forget to take them with me until they become part of the furniture and someone says, “What are these doing here?” and either puts them away or opens them. The two bucks are theirs. Maybe it’ll help make up for all those packages of batteries they have walking out the door.
“Anyone who’s paid more in health insurance than they otherwise would have paid for care must simply never go to the doctor” or hasn’t hit their body’s sell-by date yet.
Yes, because when I’ve ordered things online and had issues like that, typically, the answer has been “Eh, keep 'em.”
Up until my late 60’s, I went to the doctor about every two years for a basic checkup at which they said I was fine.
Then I found myself feeling a bit like the one-horse shay.
@RollOutTheBarrel, my ‘other’ is ‘needs further info’. Both of them have done something unethical, but one may be worse than the other; or it may not. The mom-and-pop store is a whole lot more likely to be driven out of business by petty theft – but does the thief perhaps know that they’re genuinely nasty people? Is the corporation particularly nasty? Will the big corporation take it out on the individual cashier? and so on.
This. Exactly.
It depends. A few years ago, because of my circumstances at the time, I was paying full price for medical insurance. That was well over $1000 a month. No way did I incur even close to that in medical expenses, and I went to the doctor regularly. (However I did not have any major medical issues then.)
I actually own a kiwi spoon - one like this:
I use the pointy bit to peel an end off, and then scoop it out like a soft-boiled egg.
Although sometimes I just eat the kiwi skin and all. Depends on the kiwi and my mood.
I find just a regular spoon works. I guess eating the skin depends on a few things, time available to eat, degree of ripeness, and do I need the fiber.
I’m not positive about recouping health insurance cost, but I think yes. Back when my husband was employed through the University it was obviously worth it. Now he is self employed. We pay about $30,000 a year between insurance and deductibles. I’m guessing on my mental health expenses alone, therapy and medication, we about break even.
But now we have an autistic kid who requires a lot of therapy. That’s assuming we can ever get the insurance company to fucking cover his therapy services. It’s been an absolute logistical nightmare.
But supposing we do ABA, the gold standard intervention for autistic children. That’s a cool $20,000 to $40,000 per month (yes, month) for intensive therapy, at which point we’re on the hook for 20% of that. So realistically, with coverage, we are spending $2-4k per month on ABA alone.
So yes, spending $2,000/month on therapy services is better than spending $20,000 per month but I can’t say I feel really good about it. No matter what we’re going to hit that out of pocket max, which is something like $15,000, so we’re really looking at spending $45,000 a year on medical expenses, with insurance.
This is America.
Holy crap. Having always had employer-subsidized health insurance, I admit I had no idea it cost this much. So I’ll retract my previous assertion. What a shit system we have in this country.
The cost is outrageous and they get away with profound incompetence and outright lies all the time. Trying to get services for my son has been truly eye-opening. Most of the time they don’t know their own policy, my husband has had to read it back to them verbatim, they tell us one thing and our therapists another thing, they can’t make up their mind whether or not to cover unlimited services for a disabled child that is on a 1-2 year wait list for a diagnosis at one of their required centers. We have a diagnosis, ADOS-2, everything by the book and it’s not good enough. More evaluations, more testing, more proving our child needs help. And to be clear, this isn’t a case of borderline disability. This is a child with substantial support needs. Speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, at a minimum.
The last appeal we submitted was for his feeding therapy, which they limit to 30 sessions a year without an autism diagnosis. My husband submitted extensive documentation including the full report from the evaluating psychologist. He included reports from the daycare that in his entire six months of being in daycare my son had not eaten a single meal.
The final decision: They agreed that my son had a lifelong medical condition and that the feeding therapy was medically necessary. But they didn’t have to pay it because he wasn’t diagnosed at the time of services.
It’s complete garbage.
Yikes. Is there no maximum-out-of-pocket? I thought most health insurance plans cap it at something like $8,000 out of pocket for any given year so you know you won’t have to go above that; at least that’s what I always had.
Yes, our out of pocket max is about $15,000. That does not include the cost of the premium.