Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

[sunskyfan]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/10/leslie-margolin-former-bl_n_677225.html

In New Mexico. I am self-employed. I buy my own health insurance fro BC&BS. Before you say "try someone else". I did last year with the other major carrier in the state. Was rejected outright for a pre-existing damaged nerve shoulder condition I have had since I was 17. Didn't seem to bother anybody before. Yes, not even an exclusion rider.
So, I have no choice. Since there is no public option I either can take the risk and spend that $5300 a year on medical expenses and pay Mr. Obama's fine come January or I can continue to pay for someone else. I have seen the doctor once in the last two years for a cold. The letter explicitly said that the cost increase was due to "health care services continues to increase" or they were just as expensive.

They did give me a 800 number to call to see if I was eligible for the high risk pool. Thanks. I could also get somewhat cheaper if I accepted a new plan with a cap on coverage.

Smells like a bubble to me but it is not the greed of the participants it is the collusion of the sellers.

Yes, this may seem like peanuts to some but when the economy truly starts to unravel it will be triggered by people and businesses stop paying their health insurance premiums. That time may be sooner that we think.

[BigBagel]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Terrible. I just looked at plans available in your state. There's a subsidized state plan for small business owners but it has an income level of around 21,000$ and there's a waiting list.
The following currently have government subsidized insurance:
The poor.
In some states the almost poor.
The elderly.
Prisoners.
The military.
Veterans.
Those with company health plans are subsidized via the tax system.

Medicare for everybody with some tweaks would have been an easier sell but they gave us a Rube Goldberg mess instead.

[pianodoctor]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

I (healthy, self employed also) got hit with a bigger increase than that last year (or was it the year before?). I had to change plans to one with a much higher deductible that I could still afford. These days, business is down somewhat as well, making it harder to afford the insurance. Another big increase and I will probably have to drop it altogether and hope that I can keep enough reserves to pay for medical care in Mexico, should it be needed. Tijuana is not far. Currently I have an HSA, but between "minor" dental work and "routine" medical tests recommended for a 50ish male, about 10 years worth of maxed out HSA savings was drained in a right hurry. For instance, I found that if a dentist does virtually anything to a tooth these days, it's $1,200 per. Multiply that by as many teeth that need virtually anything done to them. My insurance doesn't cover dental, so out of the HSA account it comes. And since the deductible is so high, it doesn't cover most of the MD stuff as well. Also, I believe that cash-payers like me are being stuck with much higher bills than what insurance companies are billed for the same work. Like the doctors are shaking ME down for the fact that they don't get as much dough as they'd like from the insurance companies. It sucks. It really, really sucks.

[j4f2h0]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

I am 29 and self employed and went to the catastrophic policy a couple years back after BC&BS kept raising my premium on the 1500 deductible policy i had. It cost 58.65 a month. I had to get a minor surgery last year and the hospital billed me 4800 bucks, i laughed at them and they reduced it to 1200. The whole mess is crooked and at the end of the day since i have nothing to come after asset wise, i just tell the hospital/insurance people to eat me! I will not leach off the system, i will pay what i can, but if you try and make me eat less food at night to pay a hospital bill, you will quickly see where my priorities are!

[Ghent12]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

There are hundreds of options that you don't have access to. The government loves to protect certain monopolies or oligarchies, and that's exactly what each state has with health insurance companies. Imagine if the commerce clause of the Constitution was enforced like it should be and the barriers against buying insurance across state lines were removed...

But hey, let's all vote "democratically" for piss poor social goodness.

[Jeff]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

I pay $1850 a month for a BC&BS policy that's really gold plated, pays everything and has no deductibles or co-pays beyond the occasional 10 bucks. Once the soon-to-be-ex and her pre-existing condition falls off of the policy in a few months, I'll be looking for something reasonable. I've been paying the ever increasing premiums for years, and while it sucks, it had give me the excuse to get an annual colonoscopy, the same thing down the throat (I forget the term), whole body CAT scans, and a world of other stuff that I only get because I paid for this ridiculous policy.

I'm now in California- anybody know of a decent provider near San Jose or San Francisco? As for me, I can't wait for Obamacare, or better yet, single payer.

[Fiat Currency]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

... it had give me the excuse to get an annual colonoscopy, the same thing down the throat (I forget the term), whole body CAT scans, and a world of other stuff that I only get because I paid for this ridiculous policy.

Perspective is a funny thing. (BTW it's called a gastroscopy)

In Canada about 50% of the taxes you pay now go into our "free" healthcare system. For easy math - on a $100K salary you'd be paying roughly $20-25K into healthcare every year.

I'd rather have either of the deals above

[ViC78]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Perspective is a funny thing. (BTW it's called a gastroscopy)

In Canada about 50% of the taxes you pay now go into our "free" healthcare system. For easy math - on a $100K salary you'd be paying roughly $20-25K into healthcare every year.

I'd rather have either of the deals above

Umm, maybe your math is a bit off.

Here are the marginal income tax rates for Canada.

15% on the first $40,970 of taxable income, +
22% on the next $40,971 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income between $40,970 and $81,941), +
26% on the next $45,080 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income between $81,941 and $127,021), +
29% of taxable income over $127,021.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/fq/txrts-eng.html


Hence, on a 100K income, your effective taxes are 19854.34. Not sure where you obtained the figure of 50% of taxes towards healthcare (I could not find any references on the web), but assuming that is true, that means that you spend $827.26 for healthcare per month.

[Fiat Currency]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Umm, maybe your math is a bit off ...

Again - perspective is funny thing. Thanks for sharing the tax rates for those who can't recite them in our sleep

But even Wiki's low not-all-in number of $5,452 per person (here) means a family of 4 is costing $21,808 ... and Canada is paying well over that per year for National Healthcare - much of it hidden by Provincial transfer payments etc.

Taxes are like inflation. They hide everywhere. GST, PST, land taxes, deficits, sin taxes, gas taxes, etc. Canada's Tax Freedom Day puts our total tax rate at 42.6%. Oddly enough that would be $21,300 on $100K pretty close to Wiki's number.

You don't have to agree with my "almost 50% goes to healthcare" but I've poured through the Provincial & Federal books & we're pretty much there.

I stand by my assertion, but you are free to disagree.

[housingcrashsurvivor]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Healthy male here low mileage 50s. Knock wood I hardly ever get even a cold. Lots of longevity in the family. Relocated to reduce cost of living. Health insurance dropped from $450 to 350/mth on moving while keeping same company, same policy ($5k deduct, no copays). This year they want $415/month, similar increase as the OP's example. Also I was given the very same reason "cost increases".

I could maybe understand the cost increases if I actually ever claimed any charges. At this annual rate of increase, by the time I'm eligible for medicare (assuming it still exists by then), I'll be paying about $2500/month. Guess I should start shopping a new policy (or an exit strategy).

[ViC78]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Again - perspective is funny thing. Thanks for sharing the tax rates for those who can't recite them in our sleep

But even Wiki's low not-all-in number of $5,452 per person (here) means a family of 4 is costing $21,808 ... and Canada is paying well over that per year for National Healthcare - much of it hidden by Provincial transfer payments etc.

Taxes are like inflation. They hide everywhere. GST, PST, land taxes, deficits, sin taxes, gas taxes, etc. Canada's Tax Freedom Day puts our total tax rate at 42.6%. Oddly enough that would be $21,300 on $100K pretty close to Wiki's number.

You don't have to agree with my "almost 50% goes to healthcare" but I've poured through the Provincial & Federal books & we're pretty much there.

I stand by my assertion, but you are free to disagree.

I did not say that I disagree with your assertion, just said that I would like to find the source for it. If you are counting the other taxes as well in your accounting, we pay almost all of those taxes here as well - sales taxes, sin taxes, property taxes etc. This is in addition to the humongous healthcare premiums, and most of it is paid by the employer. If you don't have a job, tough luck. Most of your savings will go towards paying your insurance bills. If you have a chronic disease on top of that, good luck finding a carrier willing to enroll you.

Seriously, you are one of the very few people that I have spoken to in Canada (I lived in Victoria, BC for about 2 years), who does not like the healthcare system over there. Is it perfect? I doubt it is, any program is bound to have inefficiencies, but I think it is a hell of a lot better than what we have over here.

[Fiat Currency]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

... Seriously, you are one of the very few people that I have spoken to in Canada (I lived in Victoria, BC for about 2 years), who does not like the healthcare system over there. Is it perfect? I doubt it is, any program is bound to have inefficiencies, but I think it is a hell of a lot better than what we have over here.

Fair enough. But if "here" is in the USA for you - then from the link above - your total tax rate is 26.9% vs. our 42.6% ... and on $100K that's a difference of $15,700 !!

I don't like the PRICE TAG of our Healthcare system, and the wait times are unnecessarily long especially considering the PREMIUM we pay compared to the rest of the World. Given the choice - I would take back all the taxes I paid into Healthcare and get my own coverage. Like most things run by Government - I am not a fan.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

Perspective is a funny thing. (BTW it's called a gastroscopy)

In Canada about 50% of the taxes you pay now go into our "free" healthcare system. For easy math - on a $100K salary you'd be paying roughly $20-25K into healthcare every year.

I'd rather have either of the deals above

Canada can afford to do that however because their immigration policy favors intelligent and educated foreigners. In the US, we favor the idiots so that they quickly get on the government dime and vote for democrats.

I'd much rather spend 50% of the federal budget and healthcare than pay for the room and board of voters of the democrat machine.

[charliebrown]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

My friend just left our company, he got the cobra quote of 13k for family coverage. PPO with 250 deduct per person, 4k out of pocket max, no limit coverage. 20/80 copay on pharma.

I just had an emergency appendectomy, they did a great job, but one day in the hospital was 35K retail price. Ouch.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Healthy male 47 ... just me ... rates from $369 to $439 a month in one shot.

I just had an emergency appendectomy, they did a great job, but one day in the hospital was 35K retail price. Ouch.

One of the things that angers me the most about the healthcare debate in this country is that there is virtually no serious discussion of WHY the cost of healthcare rises so fast. The Democrats passed a 2,000 page healthcare law with a comically huge number of new complications for the health care business, but I don't recall anyone discussing how that 2,000 pages of bureacratic horror was going to actually address the root causes of the problem. As near as I can tell, it doesn't. The concern of the Democrats was not to address the root causes of skyrocketing health care costs; their concern was to extend free government-paid health care to a larger number of their constituents.

Check this out. Here are two invoices for stays in the hospital by my grandfather in 1944. One was for two days, one was for 12 days:


http://img683.imageshack.us/i/hospitalinvoice19441.jpg/

http://img413.imageshack.us/i/hospitalinvoice19442.jpg/

The total bill for a 12-day stay in the hospital in 1944 was $84.75. Adjusted for inflation, that is $1,040 in today's dollars.

In the 66 years since my grandfather was in the hospital, we've had fantastic innovations that have dramatically reduced the costs of other high-technology goods and services. Take computers, for example. In just the 16 years since I paid $4,000 for a top-of-the-line 66mhz 486 computer with 16 meg of memory in 1994, I can now get a laptop that is a fraction of the size of that tower machine and that is 40 times faster and has 250 times as much memory for less than 25% of the price - and that's without considering inflation.

If we could lower the price of a computer that fast in that short time, how come the inflation-adjusted cost of a surgery and stay in the hospital has gone up by a factor of 30 or 40 since 1944?

What has been so skewing the normal free-market incentives to lower price and improve quality in the health care marketplace?

If we don't answer that first, how can we possibly come up with policies that will actually fix healthcare?

I think the best explanation is this:

* runaway malpractice awards driving up doctors' insurance premiums (the health care bill does nothing to address this)

* "free" government healthcare provided to a huge number of people who did not get it in 1944, allowing health care providers to massively increase what they charge. Just like free government money for college has driven the cost of a college education through the roof since the 1970s before the big government student loan programs got started.

So my guess is that it is government intervention in the health care marketplace that has driven inflation-adjusted costs up by a factor of 30 or 40 since the 1940s.

How could having the government entirely take over the health care system possibly be an improvement?

At the very least, wouldn't it be better to go back to whatever system for payment we had in the 1940s that allowed a man to stay in the hospital for 12 days at a total cost of only $1,040 in today's dollars?

By all rights, with a true free market in health care services, by now the cost of that 12 day stay should have been down to perhaps $200 or $300 in today's dollars due to improvements in efficiency!