The difference is that you chose to do this when you were healthy and have been honestly paying all along. The other guy would be getting the insurance because he got sick.
Like I mentioned above, my husband was uninsured when we married. He had already lost his job and had to declare bankruptcy for medical bills. One of the reasons we married was to get him on my insurance.
It seems from this angle of argument that you would say we were in the wrong.
By the way, he’s disabled now and receiving SS and Medicare. The disability was possibly exacerbated by the years he couldn’t afford medication.
I was trying to explain Trunk’s argument, not expressing my own opinion. I should have been more clear.
I would have no problem with such a marriage.
You’re all ignoring motive in this. The OP expressed the interest to marry him simply to get him in on her insurance.
I’d fall back on the classic question behind most ethical issues: what if everyone behaved this way?
That is, what if everyone shunned insurance until their circumstances made it automatically cost effective to enter into it?
No one could offer it. We would cease to have it.
You see – I’m coming at this from the point of view of someone who is on “the shit end of the stick” insurance wise. I take care of my health. I eat right. I exercise. I’m a healthy weight. I don’t smoke. There’s a very slight chance I’ll ever take out of insurance what I put into it.
I feel like I’m in a “battle” with the people in my office who eat terribly, don’t exercise, overuse medication. But, at least they’ve been paying $2000 a year into it.
And. . .here comes the OP, saying she wants to bring a guy into “MY” insurance who is about to enter cancer treatment. She didn’t want to bring him in when he was healthy. She just wants my money. She wants all the upside of insurance and none of the downside.
Sometimes, that happens. Yeah. . .when I got married, the wife could have come down with cancer the day after I added her to my plan. And, sometimes people get sick right after they drop the plan, and I “lucked out”. The action the OP is describing is throwing the entire concept of “some winners, some losers” out the window.
We’d have a completely different system.
And since I don’t consider health insurance the way it exists right now to be a “good” worth fighting for, I’ve got zero issue with that.
Wrong? Right? Whatever.
At least you should recognize that people with a lifestyle like mine subsidize it.
I’m willing to do it. That’s part of being insured, part of being a citizen. But when sometimes openly declares it, don’t expect me to be nice about it.
I’ve pushed for HSA’s around this office. It’s been met with nothing but resistance. The unhealthy don’t want the healthy leaving the insurance pools, any more than the healthy want the unhealthy moving in. It’s two sides of the same coin, but one side just sounds less politically correct.
I get what Trunk is saying…our insurance system isn’t the best, but it could be made much, much worse if too many people did this kind of thing. I think as far as deciding whether getting married would be ethical or not would partially depend on why he didn’t have health insurance in the first place.
But I think the bigger issue for Alice to consider is what his true feelings for her are…it sounds to me as if he is in love with her, and if she is not in love with him, a marriage could be fraught with emotional pain.
Since I’ve been healthy as a horse, I hardly think you get to claim some superiority over me. Actuarially speaking, your rates would probably be higher without me (since I’m female and healthy) and lower without my husband.
There is no rule that says you have to be paying for a certain time throughout your life in order to qualify for insurance benefits. You could have been sickly for decades, too. It makes no difference. You have to be married to someone who is insured and pay the premium. Period. There is no ethical issue here. People marry for all kinds of reasons and reap the benefits of that legal agreement.
Or you can go in sick and reap the benefits immediately; knowing you’ll get more out of it than you’ll ever pay into it. So what? There’s nothing wrong, illegal, or unethical about it. That’s how the system works. People change jobs; they drag their medical baggage with them from insurer to insurer. Should we be mad at those selfish bastids who have children who suck up the benefits with all their immunizations and childhood ills and (gasp!) broken bones? Some people use more insurance than others. That’s the point.
I agree with this. The unrequited love thing is the only thing that would keep me from entering into this arrangement. Everything else is absolutely legit.
YAY!
Oh, wait. You think that’s a **bad **thing, right? 
I’m not going to argue with a single thing you wrote, because I know they’re all true. I just want to make it clear that the arrangement in the OP is a violation of my personal ethics. I’m not disputing whether they’d be allowed to marry, or whether he’d be legally entitled to the benefits; of course they would be, and of course he is. I’m not under the impression there’s a law or policy out there saying married people must love each other and that only romantically-in-love married people are allowed to use insurance benefits. I’m just saying that marrying someone I don’t romantically love to use my benefits is wrong to me, and that I could not do it.
It’s kinda like how some people think it’s wrong to put ketchup on a hot dog. Just because you think it’s wrong to do so, it doesn’t mean it’s because you believe Oscar Mayer passed laws to that effect or that your use of ketchup is limited by Heinz corporate policy. It’s just wrong for personal reasons.
It is fascinating to me to find out that a 50 year old man can get insurance on his own for $400 a month, yet my husbands insurance would charge us $350 a month to add me. Just Me. 39, female, healthy.
I can have a bleeding heart about many, many things. However, Insurance companies sure as hell ain’t one of 'em.
Between flood insurance, homeowners insurance, car insurance and my husband and daughters insurance, we pay more for all of it than we do for our mortgage, car payment, power bill and cable combined. I’m about insuranced to the last damn dime and still have no health insurance. I’ve not had an accident in over 10 years, never made a homeowners claim, have never made a flood claim. Although I did have a child, at the time, I qualified for my employers health insurance.
Work out the personal crap Alice. Get it in writing, think of everything, then think of a bit more, then follow your heart.
Understood. Thanks.
WAG: Unfortunately, your body is in the terribly dangerous age of being a woman with “woman’s” risks (breast and cervical cancer, osteoporosis, etc.) and not far off from going through menopause and gaining the “men’s” risks (cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, etc.). You’re looking at being pretty healthy right now; they’re looking at a nightmare of possibilities to come in the next 20 years.
(raises hand) That would be me. I’ve used our insurance more in the last 3-4 years than I have in my entire life. Not because I’m sick, but because I might get sick. There’s a list of “supposed to” tests that we need to think about when we’re (ahem) of a certain age. Old people generally need doctorin’ more than young ones.