I have to agree with Winston Smith on this. These things and countless others are very likely to happen. And they happen every day. They, thankfully, just haven’t happened to you yet. I don’t have the statistics, but I highly doubt you’ll find any hospital emergency rooms that have many days without any customers.
I know two people who have gone about 25,000 and 100,000 in debt because of unexpected problems. One was the above mentioned appendix situation, although luckily it didn’t end up bursting.
Unless you just can’t even buy yourself food right now with the health care expense, I recommend that you keep it. You’ll be very glad you did if you ever need to use it. Plus, as others have mentioned, preventative care is incredibly important.
The concept is that they have no idea what your final bill will actually be when you are done. Let’s say you come into the hospital with $25,000 in a suitcase for a minor surgery of some kind and they take your money and treat you. Then they find you have developed an infection from the surgery and now you need an additional $8,000 for medication and other services. Your suitcase is now empty and they have no guarantee they will see that money but it is an urgent care case at that point and they are forced to treat you. Rather than take that chance most places just won’t see you.
It’s not that bad. It doesn’t break my back to pay for it either, but it DOES grate on me to write that check every month when they won’t even pay for preventative care. I get a co pay of course, but all the bloodwork, etc… is on my out of pocket cost. So they save me a whopping whole 50.00 or so a year for my 3500.00-4000.00 yearly investment.
I feel your pain. The health insurance situation is incredibly frustrating. Unfortunately, it’s our only option at the moment. These things grate on me to no end also.
Does your employer’s coverage allow you to sign up with a pre-existing condition? If so, that might be a fallback position, though they often allow you to join only once a year, so you might be stuck with the bills until you can join.
My wife’s retina detached basically over night, and it required $50K worth of surgery to fix - and she never stayed overnight in the hospital. Sure you can go bankrupt, but it will cost you a lot in higher interest rates and loss of access to credit.
The value of insurance is computed by multiplying the cost of a covered event by the probability of it happening, and summing. You might want to look up actuarial tables for your age to find the real probability of you getting seriously ill. If insurance was worth something only if it paid out, all those who buy term life would feel ripped off every single year. When it does pay off, they don’t feel anything.
Now you might still decide that insurance isn’t worth it, and you might be right. Anthem in California wants to raise rates really high precisely because the people like you who it makes money from are dropping out, just like you want to do, leaving those with expensive pre-existing conditions still in the pool. That’s exactly why we need HCR - everyone does what is rational and in their best interests, and we have a mess.
I agree that you should look at catastrophic coverage, but the policies I saw don’t pay for everything, but only 80% up to some limit. There were a lot of variations based on deductibles.
I can only add that risk is measured not only by likelihood, but also consequences. So for low risk things, like maybe an infection or something, sure, it doesn’t happen very often, and the cost is relatively low to treat, yeah, maybe having a full insurance policy is not really worth it.
For high risk things, like brain cancer, yeah, it happens so rarely and the costs are so high, I understand you’re willing to risk bankruptcy and the chance of getting poor treatment due to the lack of coverage.
But what gets me is moderate risk things – maybe breaking a bone, having your tonsils out, or the like – the current health care system is so screwed up that the cost of these things is extremely high, to the point of being unreasonable.
I think you’re crazy to go without coverage of any kind.
Hey! So am I! I eat well, I’m not overweight, and I exercise with regularity! Good genes, too - my parents are alive and well, and all my grandparents lived into their 80s and 90s, no history of any horrible diseases or cancers or anything like that.
All that fresh air and healthy living didn’t stop my pancreas from giving up the goat totally unexpectedly, though. Fookin’ thing. Luckily, I caught it in time, and I’m still healthy. It’s just that it takes $700-$900/month in medical supplies and prescriptions to keep me that way.
Granted, I’m the exception. But as people get older, you rarely see anyone who doesn’t end up with some sort of health issue that requires some expensive care. Health insurance is expensive, no doubt, but it beats the alternative IMO.
I do know where you are coming from - we had to pay private insurance for about a year after my husband got laid off. It really does suck and it is crazy how expensive it is for crappy coverage.
My advice though, is still to keep it. Find the highest deductible plan you can get and just get catastrophic coverage, but keep something. The problem is once you drop insurance, you may not get the option to just pick it up again someday. Once you have a period of non-coverage, providers can find instances during that time when you had a symptom or Dr. visit (even for something else) and claim pre-existing condition. So if you drop coverage for a few years and then decide you want it again, and get sick after you have coverage, they can look back and say, you know, you had a headache during that time you were uncovered and that is a symptom of the brain tumor you have now even though you didn’t get diagnosed until now, sorry.
So my advice is, think about 5-10 years from now and what your health may be like then as well as the money you are saving right now. If you do decide to drop it now because you are young and healthy, things change and it can be tough to get re-insured once you have dropped it. Unless as someone else has mentioned, your employer’s insurance allows pre-existing conditions (although that could change too…my employer’s health insurance changes pretty much yearly now.)
I’m adopted too, and was rarely sick. I thought my birth records were pretty clean. Then I had some testing for a female related thing and the radiologist said “Hmm, that’s interesting” while looking at the screen. Next thing you know, I was being told I have 100% genetically caused polycystic kidney disease. Whee.
A few years later I wanted to change jobs. Was informed I was uninsurable through the new employer thanks to the PKD (this was back in 95, before the outcry about people being told they could not obtain insurance, and insurance companies saying “What? Us do THAT? Never!”), so I stayed where I was.
I didn’t carry insurance for a long time when I was younger, because I didn’t work anywhere that offered it and I was reasonably healthy, so I understand your pain.
First thing I would say is, look at your medical bills again. Most insurance knocks a chunk off of the original bill and you pay what’s left. Even if you’re paying the entire remainder of the bill, the insurance may be saving you more than you think.
HIPAA improved the situation with pre-existing conditions for employer-based plans, but you can still get caught by that, even if you can enroll at will. There are some time limits, though, so you have some protection. More info here.
It’s not the bankruptcy that would worry me as much as the fact that many providers won’t take patients without insurance. So yes, you could have severe problems finding doctors and hospitals that would be willing to see you, even if you walk in with a bundle of cash.
I’ve known several people that were blindsided with medical situations that came up completely out of the blue. Without insurance they would either have been unable to treat their problems and/or ended up bankrupt.
Most people are healthy and don’t have any need for insurance - until they do.
I’ll second everyone who has advised you to at least keep some kind of catastrophic/hospitalization coverage. Go without coverage for preventive care and minor stuff, if you must. What you want is to not go bankrupt if you require hospitalization or surgery of some kind.
Nobody is required to take your cash if you don’t owe them money. They can simply decline to do business with you if you tell them you intend to pay in cash.
I went without for several years, much to the horror of everyone I knew. Sure it’s a gamble, but I know how much profit insurance companies make (same reason I do not gamble at casinos - I know who the odds favor) so I figured with youth, good genes, no dependants, and no assets for anyone to seize, it was a reasonably safe gamble for me. I had no problems. As long as you are making the decision knowledgably and not inconveniencing anyoone else, go for it.
I think you should look at your financial health down the road. if you’re living in an apartment then consider buying a used mobile home so you can bank some of the rent money. The savings should be split between a 401K and your bank account so you don’t squander the new-found money. It’s important down the road that you don’t ruin your credit with a huge medical bill. Bad credit affects such things as job applications and insurance.
As for insurance, you can buy a policy that covers you after a deductible of between $5 and $10,000. You pay all the doctor/hospital bills under the deductible. You can then bank your good health on a higher deductible and put the difference into an HSA and let it build over time to cover the deductible. That way you’re fully insured against the loss. I’m 51 with high blood pressure and my policy costs $2,500/yr with a $5,000 deductible. You should be able to get it cheaper.
What she said - WinkieHubby was young and healthy with good genes and no family history of any serious health problems, until he started getting headaches. That turned out to be caused by high blood pressure. That turned out to be caused by total kidney failure. That turned out to be caused by … we actually have no idea. It just happens sometimes. One week in the hospital = $25,000 if we’d had no insurance, and that was just the beginning.