Ted Cruz gets his health insurance from his wife’s job at Goldman Sachs, and the price tag to the company is about $40,000.
If family health insurance premiums in the US are about $16,000 as of 2012, where does the other $24,000 come from? Assume that 16k plan has about 6k in deductibles and copays. Even if you eliminate them (and it isn’t a 1:1 ratio of deductibles to premium, but assume it is) that means it costs 22k for a family plan that has zero deductibles and copays. That still leaves 18k unaccounted for.
Even a plan that covers tons of alternative therapies shouldn’t cost much more, alternative therapies (massage, energy work, nutritional support, etc) tends to be $50-80/hr. That shouldn’t add up to $18,000 a year, most people aren’t going to engage in several hundred hours a year of alternative therapy.
If the sickest 5% of people use half of health spending that is about 15 million people spending about 1.3 trillion a year, or about 90k per year per person. For a family of four that would be 360k a year.
But the vast majority of people aren’t in the most expensive 5% each year.
My point is, how is it possible for a health plan to cost $40,000 a year, even for a family (most people who have jobs that offer those kinds of insurance plans probably only have 1-2 kids).
It’s possible. My wife’s company had a Rolls Royce plan. It covered everything from dental to psychotherapy and deductibles were minimal. When she left, the COBRA was about $40k for the family. However, that plan was hardly the norm. Anybody that uses that as a comparative is a lying sack of excrement. (If you look up “lying sack of excrement” in the dictionary you will see a picture of Ted Cruz and the Fox logo.)
We now have a legitimate LLC and the cost of a good family plan, not an HMO, is less than $10k a year. It actually went down by about $200/mo. from last year.
High-end insurance might be willing to pay more for the same things covered by other policies. That’s helpful if you want access to upscale providers.
There is also a second advantage that they don’t like to talk about much. The more you pay them, the less grief they will give you or your doctors. If your insurance is expensive enough, then every vaguely plausible medical bill will be paid, no questions asked.
I know middle-class people with moderately good health insurance who still ended up with huge debt after fighting cancer. This page claims the average out-of-pocket expense for cancer treatment, for someone who has health insurance, is $1266/month. I imagine a health insurance plan that covers most of those expenses would cost a lot more than a “standard” plan.
Also, with my plan, I often hear things like “insurance will only pay for that test once a year”. Presumably a more expensive insurance plan will pay for more such tests.
The source for the Huffington Post article is this 2009 article from The New York Times, which says, “A health care package costing $40,000 or more a year would generally have no co-payments or deductibles, according to Paul Fronstin, an analyst at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit that studies benefits. It would also have no limits on doctors or procedures, no restrictions on pre-existing conditions and no requirements for referrals.” Note that the NYT article is not saing this is what the Goldman Sachs plan contains, but instead is a description of what such an expensive plan might contain.
No network limitations
low/no copay or deductibles
No pre-existing condition riders
no limits on procedures
no referrals to see a specialist
Not all oecd nations offer these but many offer most of them.
No waiting?
Private Rooms?
Doctors limited to treating ~ 100 patients?
For $40K/year in the US, you’re getting the kind of premium care that no “homeless person” is going to get in Europe. There are lots of ways to slam the US Healthcare system (although none appropriate in this forum), but claiming a homeless person in Europe gets the kind of luxury care that $40k/year Insurance plan gets you in the US is nonsense.
I agree its off topic and perhaps exaggerated, but a homeless person in much of the western world has more reliable and affordable health care than all but the best off Americans.
Also all the perks listed in that article are considered basic rights in most wealthy countries rather than perks for a 40k a year plan (low/no copays/deductibles, large networks or no network limitations, no referrals, no limits on care, etc).
No waiting for anything life threatening certainly. Maybe up to six months for cosmetic surgery or even something life changing like a replacement hip.
Private rooms - probably not. You will most likely share a ward with five others who might snore, wander about at night, tell you stuff you really don’t want to know about their personal lives. However, the median (and most common) stay in a UK hospital is now one day. Search | Nuffield Trust
