I could also call this post, our insurance really sucks. My employer doesn’t offer health care to “seasonal” employees (there are only three weeks out of the last 58 that I didn’t work and I’m still seasonal!) so we are stuck with the poor choices of health insurance from my wife’s employer. They are a high deductible health plan with a PPO and a higher deductible health plan with a PPO.
In short, our options are having a deductible higher than we spend on health care in the average year or having a deductible much higher than we spend on health care in the average year. We’ve exceeded the lower $2500 deductible only once, with my surgery last year. Basically, we’ve paid three years of premiums to get 24 hours worth of benefits.
Yes we have an HSA, but not a spare $50 per week to fund the entire deductible. In fact, we are currently doing $50 per month! Plus, we always have a backlog of medical bills that we are trying to pay off with it.
It’s worth noting that the salary points offered by this employer mean that employees are pretty much going to be students and lower-middle income households. Not exactly the kinds of people who can afford to pay high deductibles.
Last month, my wife was having some medical issues for which we spent the better part of the night in the ER before being diagnosed with a much simpler issue that originally feared. She’s feeling mostly recovered at this point, but it was scary at the time and required a CAT scan.
Those things aren’t cheap! Like $2000 not cheap! Not including my own hospital bill that I’m slowly paying off, we now have over $3500 in medical debt. Add mine in, and medical-related debt starts to rival our mortgage.
It doesn’t help that our local hospital could care less about your ability to actually afford your bill. We tried talking to them to get them to lower the price, or take a payment plan. No deal. They just foist you off to the bank the send all their victims to to finance their medical bills.
I have that already. And of course, the bank (1st National) can’t even be bothered to add those loans to their online accounts system, meaning I have to mail my payments and track my balance by hand.
For the other $3500, we are getting a consolidation loan. Going to pay double over 3.5 years with interest, but we are absolutely sick of getting dings on our credit and just barely legal phone calls from collection agencies One bill, one payment.
I remember arguments during the health care reform debate that some circles claimed that getting more people to sign up for an HDHP would get more people to be responsible about health care spending. I think this is a load of BS. I guess I’m “more responsible” with my health care spending because I’ll only go to the doctor if I think I’m dying.
Just going to try not to get sick again until 2016 because I’m not sure we’d be able to afford it.
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