And perhaps soon, the law will also require health insurance.
Don’t forget the liability component to both auto and home policies, my car is essentially worthless as an asset, but I could be wiped out by a liability claim from an accident. Likewise if someone is seriously injured on my property.
Seems to me that those savings are also an asset to be protected. A medical emergency can deplete them and leave you facing bankruptcy.
It is gambling. Serious accidents and illnesses hit people of all ages. You can pay with your financial well being for decades if something goes wrong. Because you have a chance of being healthy rather than sick, the degree of financial and health danger makes it a poor bet. People take the chance more now because the cost of health care goes up every year. It is a lot of money for questionable coverage.
A few things:
a) you’re only required to have third-party liability insurance. that has nothing to do with your own personal calculus of how much damage a low-odds incident can wreak on your own finances and they’re not against the value of an asset - it’s more a policy against the value of your assets, all of them. it’s mandated to ensure that others aren’t directly harmed by your stupid decisions.
b) you talk as if the “requirement” to buy homeowners insurance is of the same variety as the “requirement” to have your car insured. the aren’t even on the same planet.
c) banking premiums and saving up only makes sense to me if you’re worried solely about routine medical expenses and low-grade unexpected procedures - it does you no good to save your paltry 5-10k a year if you are diagnosed with leukemia or something.
Neither does insurance, which was my whole point. Most employer-based plans have annual and/or lifetime caps on coverage which are relatively low. This article on the problem, coincidentally, specifically mentions the case of a leukemia diagnosis.
I understand the idea of mitigating risk. I just don’t think that health insurance actually does that,m except for a narrow band of people.
I don’t know - 5 million dollars of lifetime coverage is still a lot, notwithstanding the high costs of medical care in the united states.
There are many illnesses, injuries, and diagnoses that one can be hit with that would easily wipe out the life savings of most people, but that would be comfortably within the policy limits of all but the most shittacular health insurance policies.
IMO, saying well you know i can get that really odd and expensive affliction that most normal health insurance policies won’t cover 1/2 of the expenses for, so buying into this insurance policy isn’t worth it because the insurance doesn’t actually mitigate my risk, is poor analysis.
Can you give an example?
i think you may be misunderstanding me
my point is, in the corpus of medical procedures and treatments, there are relatively few treatments which will exhaust an insurance policy’s payout limits when compared to the number of treatments that will exhaust an average uninsured person’s assets
but, no, i don’t know of a set of procedures that would run up on a 1-million or 5-million dollar policy limit - i’m not a doctor with knowledge of chronic ailments and their treatmentss or a specialist in weird ass diseases
I think it mitigates risk for a much larger group of people than you realize. First of all, not all employer-based insurance has general annual or lifetime caps. Mine doesn’t. There are annual caps for certain services, such as diabetic shoes and enteral nutrition. There is a lifetime cap for wigs and I believe there is a 30 day annual limit for inpatient substance abuse treatment. But that’s it- no dollar or day limit for hospitalization, no dollar limit for physician services or prescription medication.
But even if we stick to the case of a policy with a 1 million cap, it might not help people who encounter truly catastrophic illnesses, but it will help the much larger number of people who end up with not a $500,000 hospital bill for which the insurer pays $100,000 but for example, a $5000 bill from the emergency room, another $600 for follow up orthopedist visits and 4 weeks of physical therapy 3X a week at $200 a visit for a sprained ankle. That comes to $8000 if my math is correct- well within the limits of any policy I’ve heard of, even without accounting for the discounts I’m sure my insurance company negotiated. I could probably come up with that $8000 if I had no insurance, but I wouldn’t be able to manage two sprained ankles within a couple of years. Forget any kind of surgery - the bills for my son’s appendectomy came to around $40,000 and I couldn’t have come up with half of that.
Banking my premiums- well, my share of the premium is about $2600/yr. I can afford a sprained ankle every three years or so- if none of us have any other medical problems. But we will.
BTW, the article says that 1% of employer-offered plans had caps as low as 1 million and 22% had caps less than 2 million. That means most have caps over 2 million.
I have to ask… who do you work for? That seems like a great plan for a price way below the national average.
That’s what I pay- my employer pays a lot more. The total cost is about $6000/yr for an individual, and I don’t know how much more for the family coverage I have but I’m sure it’s at least another $6000. If that still seems low, it’s because the group includes about a million state and local government employees and retirees.
It seems to me that people, in this thread, are quoting a ridiculously high price for ER care. 2-4 years ago, I broke my shoulder, and was w/o insurance. I went to the ER, was treated, and was referred to a bone specialist, because surgery may have been required. ALL w/o being asked for payment in advance, even though I TOLD them in advance that I had no insurance. All together, my ER care, and the continual x-rays before the specialist saw me, several times during the 6-months it took to heal, plus all pain-killer drugs, cost significantly LESS than the $5k that everyone is saying is the standard cost of ER care, alone. Even THEN, I paid several of the providers HALF of what they were billing me, and they accepted that as full payment, and haven’t bothered me with bill collectors, since. Care in the US, even w/o insurance, is NOT as expensive, difficult to obtain, nor as bankrupting, as everyone IN the US, in this thread, is claiming…
BTW, I forgot to mention something, I was w/o insurance because I was UNEMPLOYED, and therefore wasn’t covered, not because I refused to BUY insurance…
The nearly $5k I paid 12 years ago for the first 48 hours of care for my broken leg was after significant discounts the hospital gave me when I told them I was uninsured. Yes they treated me without any upfront payment, and yes, I paid them off a little at a time for a couple of years afterward, with no hassles from them or from any kind of collections agency. But I bet the same care would cost double that now.
(The 4 followup surgeries, scores of physical therapy sessions, etc. cost over $100k, 12 years ago. No way in Hell would I have ever been able to pay that off if it hadn’t been covered by insurance.)
Yes, your broken leg would definitely cost more than my shoulder. As you described it in an earlier post, it was much more severe. My shoulder was a much more common “major break” (one that might require surgery, rather than just a cast).
Most don’t actually REQUIRE surgery, they merely MIGHT, like my shoulder, IF, during the healing process, things go wrong.
It’s actually the second bone-break I’ve had, although the first was considerably less severe. I could have treated that one myself with some plaster and the sleeve from an old rag shirt. My grandfather actually DID do it himself when he got a break like that back in the 1920s or ‘30s. My first was covered by my parents’ insurance, so I never saw the price.
Best way to see the difference between a true “free market”, and the abomination we currently have in the US, is to look at how much you pay your cat’s vet, vs. how much the medical establishment bills you for the same care you get. Then ask yourself if OBAMACARE is going to give you the cat’s vet’s price.
Personally, If OBAMACARE passes, I’m going to go to my cats’ vet for medical care…
Maybe so, but the initial ER care was pretty similar, no? X-rays, cast, oral painkillers, yanking by doctor and/or nurses. (And in my case, ambulance.)
There is one slight difference - how much would the estimated charges be for your cat vet care be to make your loved ones decide it would be economically advantageous to put you to sleep?
Though I have read stories about people paying absurd amounts for doggie heat bypasses or something similar.
I don’t know, but my mother would probably be willing to go up to about $2K before she has me put down. :>)
Jasg, excellent link. Thanks for that.
How does secondary insurance figure into this? If you have a house policy and a trade’s guy or a member of your family is injured on your property will that pay for medical treatment? How about road traffic accidents? Does car insurance cover medical costs of injured parties? Can you take out medical crisis insurance?