I’ll note that, if nearwildhaven is getting their health insurance from their employer, that $300 a month is likely a small fraction of the total monthly premium cost for their policy.
While most U.S. employers today do require their employees to pay a share of the premium costs for their health insurance (typically through a payroll deduction), on average, an employee only pays 18% of the premium for a “self only” policy, and 29% of the premium for a “family” policy. While smaller companies tend to require their employees to pay a greater share, even then, they’re usually only paying a minority share – employees at smaller companies (under 200 employees) only pay an average of 38% of the premium cost for a family policy. (Source)
As a result, many (probably most) Americans who get their health insurance from their employers have no idea what the total cost of their coverage actually is.
Respectfully, I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions. Here’s why.
I think there’s a good number of people who separate in their minds the quality of coverage with what insurance they have (how big is the deductible, cost of drugs, etc) with the quality of the system (if you lose your job you are probably shit out of luck).
It is entirely possible to hate the system, but feel their insurance is serving them well, and so would not want to feel like they are being sold a bill of goods on what universal health care will mean for them. (“If you like your plan, you can keep it!”)
It’s also fully possible to see advantages to our health care system, but not be happy with one’s plan. For example, they think that we would have worse doctors if their pay were cut, but their cheap-ass employer keeps cutting back on the quality of the plan offered at work.
In neither case does one’s opinion of their plan necessarily a good indicator of their feelings on single payer health care.
FTR, I voted I have OK health care coverage. I think the benefits are just fine, but the system it operates in is beyond the most convoluted, inefficient, confusing, costly, and terrible system that exists in the world.
Having lived in the UK for a short time, hooooooly cow was that level of service much better than I have today. I think my plan is probably in the gold/platinum range (does ACA still do those ratings?) and the NHS for the times I used it matched the quality of medical care I get today, but in a manner that was like ten thousand times more user friendly.
I can say that without knowing the details, we don’t know what we might get. It’s common in the US for insurers to limit which doctors you can use. It’s also common for desireable doctors to have long waiting lists, or just not be available. I had a lot of trouble finding a good primary care physician when my prior one retired.
Yes, yes, those are problems now. And yes, our health insurance system is crazy in any number of ways. But those with “good” insurance in the US probably do get better care than they typical UK citizen. We also probably get worse care than the typical Dutch or Swiss citizen, but since we speak different languages that’s less obvious.
The Canadians I know all think their system is better than ours. The Americans I know with Canadian relatives all think our system is better than theirs. I suppose we all prefer the devil we know.
I don’t understand the concept of “loving” health insurance. That’s like asking if you love the tires on your car.
I don’t love it. Rather, I need it. And as long as it does what it’s supposed to do, it’s fine. But it’s a huge problem if it fails in its role.
And that, in my estimation, is the problem with US health insurance. Sure, it does it’s job for most people, but we have far too many blowouts.
For me, I hate the US system. Ostensibly, I have good insurance through my job. But when My kid needed some diagnostic testing last year, I got hit up for about $2500 in billing which got sent to a bill collector. And now I’m considering a job change, but the issue that will be the deciding factor (once they get back to me) will be the extent of insurance coverage they will be offering - this is asinine! And my wife got into a fight with the dentist’s office after they waffled about whether they take our dental insurance - they tried to charge $250 for our 7 year old’s cleaning even after she called ahead to ensure we are “in network.”
Ah, yes, the classic conservative “Sucks to be you” mentality. You don’t care about what it’s doing to other people or the bigger picture, as long as you’ve got yours, right?
I voted, “I have private insurance, and it sucks” because there was no Medicare option to choose, and before I got on Medicare, I had crappy private insurance. If I were still employed, I would have selected the via-employer-and-it-sucks option, because I was a public school teacher in Wyoming, which opted out of expanding Medicaid out of sheer hatred for Obama.
However, even if I’d had excellent employer insurance, I’d still be for single-payer because I can see beyond my own interests, and I’m not a jerk.
I own a small business, so we’ve bought off the marketplace since it’s been available. Before that I was utilizing Cadillac insurance from my employer (a union). I loved that plan, but it cost my employer $2,100/month (me, nothing).
Currently, my insurance is fine, but not great (a sliver plan). I had hernia surgery last winter, and I’m still paying the part of the bill that my insurance didn’t cover. Without my insurance, we’d’ve been fucked. Basic doctor visits and prescriptions don’t cost much at all, if anything. Other than the surgery, I haven’t needed much in care. My wife had a pretty big procedure a couple years ago, and we also paid that bill off over the course of six months or so.
All that said, I voted that my insurance is OK. It doesn’t suck, but it’s not tremendous. As we make more money with our business, we’ll be paying more. Unless something changes in the next year or so, we may not be able to afford the silver plans anymore once the subsidy is no longer available to us.
self insured through the market place, where we get the prvilege of paying $250 a month for 3 adults. Free colonoscopy, free yearly well exams(mammogram, pelvic exam), free birth control, and negotiated rates for everything else, including mental health visits, chiropractor, physical therapy,and includes a vision plan for the first time - free yearly routine exam and $100 towards frames and lenses. OUr deductible is 12k. We’re gonna experience a bump in income this year, so not thrilled to see the bump in premium.
We were self insured before the arrival of the ACA, every year my husbands glaucoma was considered pre existing so no coverage until we were 3 years on the same plan which was a $650 premuim and rising. IF we changed insureres back to square one, with no coverage for preexisting for another 3 years. And my child’s mental health coverage would not exist at all - fuck that shit!
Another issue with “do you like your employer-provided private insurance” is that your employer can change the health insurance options they provide you whenever they want. I had a job that offered a PPO plan and a high-deductible plan when I first joined, but then changed the options to a high-deductible and a very-high-deductible plan. I liked my insurance when I was able to choose the PPO plan a lot more than when I could only choose between high-deductible plans.
I like my insurance now (though it’s another case of never having had to use it for a major medical issue) because it’s an HMO, almost all the costs are on the employer side, and I get to just think about what healthcare makes the most sense for me, but choosing between the current system and single-payer isn’t just “do I like what I have right now” because literally nothing could change as far as my situation and my employer can randomly decide to only offer crappy health care plans or plans that don’t make sense for me.
Yeah if nothing else it was enlightening. I worked for a company that had great benefits. The portion I had to pay was nominal. Hunky-dory. Then we got laid off and my COBRA bill was something like $2200 a month. Impossible of course, having no job and all. In case anyone was wondering, in the US COBRA allows you to maintain the sweet benefits you have at the time you are laid off but you have to pay for them yourself.
Now through my contracting agency I pay in the neighborhood of $1600 a month with a $3000 deductible. It’s ‘OK’ for the purposes of the poll but still a huge expense, obviously.
i checked the health insurance benefits for a job I applied for: ~$1500 a month for a family of 4 with an $11,000 deductible. I couldn’t believe it.
The post WWII economic conditions that spawned robust employer sponsored health insurance have come and gone. It’s not working anymore for too many and is now a luxury (I know, many consider this a good thing). It’s time to move on.
While I agree that the US healthcare system is broken and that single-payer would almost certainly improve things for a very large number of people…
My healthcare plan is pretty damn good. My wife retired from employment as a (unionized) state worker and she gets her healthcare benefits for free. As her spouse, I pay $26/month for mine. When we enrolled in Medicare a couple years ago, the coverage which had been with BC/BS changed over to UHC. The UHC program is basically a Medicare supplement, so Medicare is the primary payer now. Each month the retirement plan reimburses my wife and I our Medicare payments, which is about $140 for me. We have no problem at all with providers. The coverage includes dental care and eye examinations, but not glasses. It also just started providing hearing aids, which I do use.
I might add that the benefits for more recent state employees are nowhere near as good.
So…I guess you may or may not consider this a private plan, since part of the expenses are covered by Medicare.
Oh yeah. This happened to me too. Used to be a PPO or HMO, can’t really remember anymore. Then for a couple of years it was both that and a high-deductible plan. Now they’ve dropped the PPO/HMO option and all we can get is the high-deductible plan.
I have health insurance through my employer. I have no idea how good it would be overall; I’m a grad student, and I make so little that I qualify for wholly subsidized care through our local hospital/medical group. What my insurance doesn’t cover, they write off. Without that, I wouldn’t be able to get treatment or preventative care for the genetic connective tissue disorder that I have.
My boyfriend, however, has employer-based insurance. He had to quit PT for his wrist pain early because every session cost like $90. After insurance.
I’m pretty sure that, were it not for the local program and the fact that I barely make any money, I’d not have been able to get PT the times I’ve needed it (largely for neck issues related to the above-mentioned connective tissue disorder; my neck vertebrae are too loose and stuff gets pinched a lot).
Neither of us have any choice in our coverage. We both have to stay in-network for doctors, either because of plan restrictions (him) or because only one medical group in town subsidizes costs (me). There are doctors in town that would be better for both of us that we can’t go to without paying money that him and/or I do not have.
It’s ridiculous, honestly. But I put “It’s okay” for mine because…well. I’ve had worse.
I’m having trouble determining how your current $1600 a month insurance plan qualifies as “‘OK’ for the purposes of the poll.” It’s not you, it’s that “OK” is very, very vague. Other responses of people qualifying their “OK” poll replies bear this out.
My company provides me with an extremely good benefits package* including insurance. The insurance itself is at best OK, I should probably have voted that it sucks. It is confusing, ever changing and stress inducing if something actually happens. I don’t really know what is in network and out of network, and when I had surgery, I had to spend a lot of time working with the bills that came months after the procedure was done involving doctors I didn’t know.
Compared to what the typical American experience is with medical insurance, I should be in the “I love it” category, but that’s just my company’s support of the insurance package. The insurance itself, what I get from interacting with Anthem or Cigna or whomever, the “user experience” if you will, that’s not fun at all.
*the benefits package is REALLY good. Medical, dental, vision, I don’t pay for any insurance and the company covers my ‘high deductible’ with cash deposits into my HSA. It’s hard for me to say any of it sucks when I think it’s in the top tier of US benefits packages.
I voted I have insurance through an employer and it sucks, but currently I have Medicare as my primary insurer thanks to kidney disease / transplant. I use my workplace insurance for prescription copays (not covered through Medicare).
When I was on dialysis, my insurer wanted to consider every treatment as an urgent care visit, so quite expensive. It took numerous phone calls and letters to get them to lower my OOP to a standard clinic visit. Still cumulatively expensive, but obviously necessary. After the transplant, due to a gap in Medicare, my workplace insurance did their magic. And I received bills totaling almost half my yearly gross income.
I look at what my daughter is dealing with for insurance. She is working what is considered full time for a grocery store, so 30-36 hours/week. Low pay. They offer medical/dental insurance, but it would be over 30% of her gross income. She applied for MNSure (state insurance exchange), discovered she is eligible for medical assistance. Luckily for her, at the same time it was approved, she caught Influenza B. She was freaking out over one hospital visit, four urgent care visits, and a few clinic visits. When she was on my insurance that right there would’ve been $500 OOP. Under medical assistance, she has paid $6.00 for prescriptions.
She and her boyfriend have discussed getting married. He has decent insurance, $100/biw premiums, $2500 deductible, through his smallish employer. Were they to get married and add her to his insurance, it would balloon up to $500/biw with a $10k deductible. Basically, almost her entire net income would pay for their medical insurance.