I am one of those people that you read about who has to pay her own health insurance. As a self-employed person, the system is set up so that I don’t get lower group rates, those are for large employers.
Also, I am old. The older a person is the more expensive health insurance is. Just because I paid into it my whole life and have not needed much in the way of health care doesn’t mean I get a break now. Rates go up every year.
Our largest household expense each month is health insurance and it would be worse but I have the crappy bronze plan with the sky-high deductible and a Health Savings Account.
The health insurance is very expensive and the actual health care is poor. Partly because the insurance company controls the amount and type of care given.
When we go for medical treatment, there are no price lists and there are “gotcha” charges for “out of network” services which can be anything a hospital decides a patient needs. I have tried asking ahead of time how much something is going to cost and nobody knows. Instead of getting an answer they ask me if I have insurance but the insurance.
In addition to figuring out which plan I should choose during the open enrollment, I have to deal with an online health insurance marketplace that doesn’t work well and if I have a question I can expect to be put on hold for hours.
I have often wondered how many entrepreneurs there are out there who never reach their full potential as they stay in dead-end jobs because of health insurance. Health insurance is just another way that corporations can keep people working in jobs that really suck.
Our household receives marketing materials from insurance companies every day. That is part of what we pay for when we pay for health insurance. We are also paying for those fancy office buildings and clinics not to mention the sky-high salaries of insurance company executives.
Billions of dollars are spent on what is called BIR (billing and insurance-related) costs.
It would be nice if there were no insurance companies and if we could just pay for medical care.
The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are great examples of how people with the money are making the laws. The medical industry gives billions of dollars of our money to politicians who make laws that favor the medical industry over their constituents. There are laws about group rates and about who can get employer-based insurance and who can not.
Once open enrollment is over I do my best not to think about health insurance because I need to keep my blood pressure in check. I don’t want to pay for the drugs that people take for high blood pressure.
