Who loves their private health insurance?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m following the election and there’s a bunch of talk about “165 million Americans have private insurance and love it and would be mad if you took theirs away”. I’m wondering who these people are and what percentage of people with insurance actually love it or would rather have MFA.

This poll isn’t for people without insurance, or those already on Medicare. Just those Americans with private health insurance.

I’m in a probably not too common situation in that I have both private insurance and completely covered government provided insurance.

I’m rated at 50% disability by the VA, so get all of my medical care and prescriptions for free. Paid for of course by my and your taxes. When I need to see a doctor I call and make an appointment. All my meds are mail order and free. When I run out of refills I use the automated system and the pharmacy contacts my doctor to get more refills. Once every great while my doctor wants to see me before doing more refills.

I also have private insurance through my employer for my wife and 1 kid who’s still under 26. I think it’s decent insurance, but I don’t really know. I pay around $600 a month for it. I have a $3000 deductible that has to be met before insurance pays anything, but my employer covers the 1st $2000 of that in a Health Reimbursement account. I’d say I usually wind up paying out of pocket, above my premium around $1k to $2k a year.

My healthcare through the VA is the easiest thing ever. Call, make appointment, go. Call, order drugs, receive them. I get all my care from the VA, and would only not use the VA in an emergency.

My wife’s and kid’s healthcare is expensive, and no where near as easy. Every doctor visit comes with a claim and a bill. The one time my wife had a serious medical issue and was hospitalized for awhile, I was sifting through pages and pages of claims and trying to figure out who all still needed to be paid.

Prescriptions can only be refilled twice before I have to go through the hassle of getting them set up through the mail order pharmacy.

Despite this I know a lot of people have it worse with having to fight to get things covered and get the meds their doctor has ordered.

In short, my private health insurance is big pain in the ass and I hate dealing with it. I dread her having another serious issue that would require hospitalization again.

I would gladly, with a song in my heart, pay the roughly $7000 I’m paying in premiums every year into taxes instead and never have to deal with insurance again.

2

I don’t have any health insurance at all, but a close acquaintance did, and when she became very sick they provided thorough care. To list the ailments she suffered from during her final years would seem exaggerated — inoperable cancer was almost the least of her worries. (She did receive much cancer treatment which was stopped only when contraindicated by other ailments). The money expended on her — at no cost to her — must have been huge. (BTW, sick as she was, for reasons beyond our scope here she thought her final several months, kept alive by her health insurance, were especially happy!)

I do NOT approve of the American healthcare system, and would like to see a gradual move toward single-payer. But promulgating Fake Facts — that few Americans like their health insurance — may not be the proper way to get there.

3

I’m not promulgating anything. I’m asking for people’s opinions of their own health insurance. Attempting to find out what people actually think, hence the poll. Maybe 165 million Americans do love their insurance and I’m unique in my dislike of mine.

4

My employer-provided health insurance is pretty good, but single-payer would probably be better.

5

I voted “OK” because my employer-provided insurance does provide some coverage and by American standards it’s not too horrible, but I hate it. (By the standards of actually civilized nations it sucks)

I have been trying to set up everything for an annual physical for three weeks and I’m ready to tear my hair out. I have to contact the doctor and get on his schedule. Instead of the doctor’s office doing a blood draw and getting routine tests done I have to be the one to find a lab, make sure it’s in system, then get the doc’s office to see the test request to the lab (that’s the current speed bump), then make sure the lab sends the results to the doc, then make sure the [del]health extortionists[/del] insurance company gets the results on time or else my premiums are going to go up to “encourage” me to get a physical.

They are already bombarding me with reminders to lose weight, get a flu shot (hey, guys - allergic, remember?), reduce stress, don’t sit at my desk all day (WTF? I stand at a cash register for an 8 hour shift), talk to a nurse on their help line instead of go to a real person in real life, and trumpet “reduce health costs!” which really means “don’t cost us money”. Oh, and this month they pushing “get your prescriptions our new whatever” - um, I get my inhaler script refilled once a year. That’s it. Everything else has been OTC for years. I don’t need a “pharmacy manager” yet they’re trying to get me to sign up.

There’s some sort of complicated bullshit to access my “health savings account” which I’m not clear on, despite being intelligent, college-educated, and having actually worked in the health industry for a time. I think I might use it to buy a new pair of eyeglasses, assuming I can work out how to do that before my next appointment.

Oh, working in the industry - there was so much talk about “protecting” people from “overtreatment” - as if 99.9999% of the population goes to the doctor or a hospital for the fun of it. :rolleyes: Nope, it was all about “how do we keep people from costing us money even when they’re sick or injured” but Og forbid you actually say that.

My current health insurance is better than nothing. Which is damning with faint praise.

6

Meant to add:

Frankly, using the Indiana version of Medicaid was a LOT easier and less hassle. The premiums were set as no more than a low single-digit percentage of our income (I think it was 2.5%) no matter how low that was, we seldom saw co-pays, and according to my-sister-the-doctor the cancer treatment my husband received was in no way inferior to anyone else’s.

Then, the day my husband died I was deemed to make too much money as a single person to stay on the program so, congratulations, Broom, your husband died and you yourself lost your health insurance. The only bright spot was that I knew that was coming and had the smarts to contact my employers’ HR in time to get on their program… because, yes, if I had NOT known to do that (and no one tells you that, in my experience) then I would have had NO health coverage other than the ER until the next “open enrollment” period late in the year. Even so - I pay more money for less coverage, with a shit-ton of deductibles and co-pays. The government run system was superior in nearly every way, even if still flawed. (I spent a LOT of time on the phone trying to find providers that would take Medicaid - once I found them it was good, though.)

The notion that the US had good health insurance is a goddamned lie and once again I’m seeing the scare-mongering ads and hearing my fellow citizens repeating the memes that “they’re taking our health insurance away!”. The industry is scared shitless that one day the US is going to wake up to the fact they’ve been lied to and sold a hollow shell.

Do you hear me, fellow Americans? You’ve been lied to. Your health insurance is NOT great. In truth, even the best of it sucks. And you’re not even getting results as good as other folks’ for all your money and frustrations. Our outcomes our poorer despite spending more. The private health care model is a failure. It is past time to replace it with has been proven to work better in literally over a hundred other countries. Why do we continue to be so stupid and cruel?

7

I.m not American, so please excuse me posting here.
I do have relevant information.

I live in the UK with Universal Health Care.*
I also had private health care for 18 years (provided cheaply by my last employer.)
So it’s perfectly possible to have both (and at less cost than the US system.)

*last year I had bad luck. I first got gallstones and later liver sepsis (potentially fatal.)
The diagnosis included blood tests, several MRIs and several ultrasounds.
The curing involved two trips to hospital - both by ambulance, two operations (one lasted over 3 hours) and me staying in hospital for a total of 2 weeks (recovering.)

Total cost to me: $0. (All prepaid by our taxes.)

8

I hate my health insurance, and do not really use it. It’s just there for catastrophic illness.

I’m self employed. I used to like my plan. Then the “affordable” health care thing happened and my premiums skyrocketed while my coverage shrunk. I tried to maintain a positive outlook, some people were being helped, but it’s continued to go to shite.

Yeah, I was getting junk mail from my insurer a few times a week, so I stopped opening mail from them. I had my premium payment paid automatically through my bank. It turns out there wee some issues and they tried notifying me, but I tossed the notifications as junk.

After several months, I happened to look at a mailing. When I called them, the person I spoke with said they’d been trying to notify me and I explained that all the crap I got in the mail from them went straight into my burn box.

Healthcare in the US is broken.

9

Polls like this really need another option, for “I have no idea how good my insurance is, because I’ve never needed to use it to any significant degree”. Before the ACA, most Americans didn’t have insurance at all, but didn’t know it. What they instead had was a scam where they paid money until they needed insurance, and then got dropped for some bullshit reason. That’s not insurance. But they didn’t know that until they got to that point: Before then, all they had to judge their insurance by was trivialities like how friendly the person on the phone was.

It’s a lot better now, since the ACA outlawed a lot of the techniques the “insurance” companies used to do this. But it’s still not perfect.

10

I pay over $1000 a month to insure myself, my husband, and son. For that, we have a family deductible of over $5000, so unless we get really, really sick, all my $12k/yr gets me is an annual checkup and access to negotiated rates. We probably spend around 3k in medical expenses over and as above insurance premiums each year.

This is by far our single largest household expense. Mortgage doesn’t come close.

I am a public school teacher.

11

To be more specific, my insurance sounds like it’s fantastic compared to what other posters are saying.

I work for an employee-owned grocery store and our contract stipulates that our benefits must be as good as or better than our union competitors. My monthly premium is $30, with a $100/year deductible and a $1000/year out-of-pocket maximum. A visit with my regular doctor costs about $15. Most of my meds are a $5 co-pay or less (except for my daily asthma inhaler and my epi-pen, which are about $40 each per fill-up). When I had to be hospitalized for two days a few years back, it ran me about $600. The billing clerk at my podiatrist was actually surprised to find that my insurance covered custom insoles. I’ve never had an issue lining up an appointment with a specialist or getting lab work done.

I’d probably still be better off with single-payer, though, because I’d be screwed if I got sick enough that I lost my job.

12

I pay $350/month for a family of 4 which includes full medical/dental/vision
100% coverage of everything, no co-pays.
We have an on-site, overstaffed, walk-in clinic with a pharmacy at my office which covers most office visit stuff. They apologize profusely if you have to wait 5 minutes to see a doctor.
When I see doctors off site their office staff gets giddy when they see my insurance. The few times I have submitted a claim for an out of network doctor I’m pretty sure they sent me a check for more than I paid.

I’m completely aware that 99.9% of the people in the US don’t have coverage like I do and I won’t either once I retire. But damn right now I love my private insurance and there’s no way I’d do as well with any other system.

13

But facts that are technically true can be highly misleading. I might say I like being poked in the eye with a stick if I looked around me and saw everyone else being poked in the eye with a sharp knife, and I assumed that was the only alternative.

The great majority of Americans have no idea what it means, in practice, to have universal healthcare that is free at the point of service.

An American might like their health plan because it has a low deductible, and the maximum out-of-pocket is only $5000. But how many Americans realize that these concepts are simply unknown in most countries outside the U.S., that for most people when you get hurt or sick the first thing you think about is not what it will cost you, because you just get the treatment you need and it costs you nothing?

An American might say that they like their insurance because their insurer seems to be fairly easy to deal with, compared to some others. How many Americans have experienced not having to deal with an insurance company at all?

An American might say that they like their insurance because it has a large network. How many Americans realize that the very concept of “in-network” and “out-of-network” does not exist outside the U.S. healthcare system?

An American might say that they like their insurance because they are settled in their job, and have not focused on how restrictive it is that it’s tied to their job: that they might lose their “great” insurance if they wanted to change jobs or start their own business?

But above all, consider these two factors:

(1) Many people who say they like their insurance have never had to use it for anything serious, and simply don’t know the nightmare of dealing with the U.S. healthcare system in the many situations where it can fuck you.

(2) Many people who say they like it do not understand what it’s costing them. When insurance is paid for by an employer, they think it’s free or inexpensive to them. It doesn’t feel like a huge payroll tax, but it is. People’s expectations might be different if their paycheck showed a gross pay figure before health insurance costs, with the amount that their employer is paying for their insurance subtracted.

14

I’m very happy with my employer-sponsored private insurance, and would be sore as hell if some politician tried to take it away from me and replace it with a government-issued product. I don’t like being a single-issue voter, but that would be enough to turn me into one.

15

This. As someone (I think it may have been Broomstick) said in an earlier thread on the topic, most Americans who have health insurance through their employers are reasonably happy with it, but most Americans really haven’t had to stress-test their insurance. They haven’t had a serious illness, and they haven’t been in a position where their doctor recommends a treatment, and their insurance says, “we won’t cover that.”

16

The difference a state makes. My wife and I have excellent health insurance through my district. There are several options we can choose from, and it includes dental, vision and just about anything else you can think of. Don’t know our deductible off the top of my head, but it isn’t much.

I am a public school teacher.

17

I chose something not factually accurate. Because you don’t offer the option of “I don’t have any freaking health insurance”.

But the last time I did, it fell into “I have private insurance I obtained on my own – It sucks”

I’m in Freelancer’s Union, an org that lets freelancers get group rates comparable to employer-based coverage. Premiums were originally in the high 200’s then scooted into the 300’s and last year was going to go up to around $410 per month. (dropped it; couldn’t afford it any more)

There’s a deductible. Used to be 10K per year, which I never ever hit, even with knee operations. Under Obamacare requirements / legislation, the deductible amount went down but I didn’t end up having any knee operations that year so still didn’t hit the deductible.

Not hitting the deductible, in case anyone isn’t fully aware, means I was paying my premiums and then would still pay for my medical treatment / prescriptions / office visits / whatever out of pocket.

Aggravations, aside from paying a shitload of money for the privilege of still paying all my medical costs out of pocket included:

•Being sent to a facility to get my broken foot x-rayed only to be told “no, we don’t take your health insurance here, go limp to some other facility”

• Being unable to fill prescriptions because they haven’t been approved by the insurance company yet, so go home for now, we’ll call you if and when they say you can have this

• Getting deluges of arcane bills, some of which seemed redundant, many of which I swore I’d already paid, but unable to tally them and track them – trying to call in and get clarification (“How is ‘anesthesia’ different from ‘anesthesiology services’ and why weren’t those combined into a single bill for god’s sake?”) getting dunning notices and threats of late fees… eventually giving up and just paying, unable to tally up how close I really was to the deductible or determine whether or not the bills were justified or whether I was paying more than once for something, or whether they were charging me the negotiated insurance co rate or hitting me with the unadorned unmodified uninsured-person rates due to having failed to send the correct fucking paperwork to the insurance folks.

•Receiving bills pertinent so some other person with a similar name in a facility linked to a facility I’d been to, because with all the mergers and acquisitions, multiple record-keeping systems got badly merged – which may not seem relevant to insurance but it’s relevant to the lack of single-payer, that I as the care recipient would be getting bombarded with all these bills.

I want it to be like Student Health Services at SUNY / Old Westbury when I was an undergrad student. Walk in, tell them what ails you, they diagnose and treat and prescribe, handing you the pills more often than sending you to some pharmacy. No bills. No copayments. No nothing. No paperwork, just “show me your student ID”.

18

Well, my private health insurance is also a huge PITA. I get these statements of benefits that I can’t read, and it’s incredibly hard to link actual interactions with medical people/tests to what I get billed. And I work in the insurance industry, and my father was a doctor. I’m pretty fluent in this stuff.

I would be delighted to pay taxes instead of premiums and not have to deal with the insurance.

But I voted “okay” because my actual coverage is decent. Yes, the deductible is large and the paperwork is oppressive. But I can afford the deductible, and they do actually pay for the stuff I need. (or cover it, at least, so if I exceed the deductible they’d pay) and friends who have had serious illnesses in their families have not had unreasonable difficulties getting approval for what their doctor thinks they need done.

19

I’m not voting since I’m on Medicare, but before I retired I was on very good private insurance. I’m not sure I loved it, but I liked it pretty well. Medicare is even better.

20

That part is fine, but at least when I was a student, the actual treatment sucked. My then-future-husband damaged his knee, and instead of diagnosing it or treating it, they put him on crutches. His mom took him to a better doctor over Christmas break, and he ended up with minor surgery that fixed the problem. But he then needed months of rehab because his muscles had wasted away from not walking, at the instruction of student health.

A few years later he had the same problem in the other knee, it was diagnosed promptly, and he basically had to hobble for a couple weeks before he could get the surgery, and was fine except for some little healing surgical wounds the next day. It was really night and day difference in quality of care.

THAT’s what people are worried about with government-issued health care.

And by that measure, those of us who have okay coverage from employers have decent coverage. For instance, my mom was successfully treated for myasthenia gravis. I described her situation to a friend who is a neurologist in the UK who says she would almost certainly have died had she lived in the UK.

That being said, there are tons of countries with outcomes as good or better than we have in the US, where the people pay less and deal with a lot less administrative hassle.