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Friday, December 2, 2016

Young, rich or healthy, pick any two



Congratulations, the Republicans won. The first thing they want to do is to get rid of Obama care. That should be fairly easy for them to do. Replacing it, on the other hand, is going to take hard work. Support for repeal is widespread among the incoming majority. What's lacking is any sort of consensus on what to replace it with.

I'm not going to go into any long in depth analysis of the different proposals. That information is out there and it's complicated. My reading of the different plans appear to favor the young, rich and healthy. You'll do pretty well if you have any two of those. Old, poor and sick? Too bad. There's lots of denial that's how it will turn out, but looking at the numbers, that's what I coming.

I just made my very last last health insurance payment. I had it for two years. The first year the price wasn't too horrible. The second year it went up but I continued to pay. This coming year it's getting dropped as the price is too high. In the two years I made payments I used exactly $125 in covered services. Hardly worth what I paid for it.

I've been feeling particularly mortal these days. Another of my fellow firefighters just died from lung cancer. A lot of guys I worked with died from cancer. Cancer rates in general are pretty high for firefighters. Workman's comp rarely pays the bills. They want to know at exactly which incident you came down with cancer. It's not like getting a broken leg. Cancer is often caused by repeated exposure over a period of time.

Because of that our individual insurances pick up the tab. The last guy who passed was able to get coverage at the VA because he was a veteran. They saved him from his first bout of cancer, but then it appeared a few years later in his other lung and that did him in.

Judging from past experience, I don't have a lot of hope for a decent health plan. Heck, even though I'm on a medical disability from the fire service, they don't have to cover related medical costs. They found a loop hole where they admitted my injury was job related but didn't have to cover it. That sounds unbelievable -unless you've had dealings with insurances yourself.

My guess is that any new plan is going to have all kinds of loop holes for people to fall though. I'm not going to argue about it. Just remember my words six months down the line.

-Sixbears

10 comments:

  1. There's no way that a company can insure everyone and keep the rates affordable. If the government tries to force them to do so, many companies will just take their money, close their doors and start some other kind of business. I can't blame them, but it sure leaves folks like you and my wife in the lurch.

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    1. It's such a mess that the only thing that could sort it out is a single payer plan.

      I used to think that capitalism could solve it, but now I'm not so sure. It makes sense for capitalists to hike up the price of medications and we've seen plenty of that.

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  2. Health tax for husband and I plus our under 25 kid was going to be pushing $20,000 + for 2017. Expecting this, early this year we joined a church and several months later joined a Christian Health Share. We are healthy enough that this was a reasonable choice. While I have high hopes for a positive outcome of this mess called "affordable" health care with our new president, we were not willing to bet $20,000 on it for the coming year. I am very happy with our new chosen direction and feel we will be comfortable until the new plan shakes out. I should point out we are self employed so we get no insurance help from employer.

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    1. Good luck. Hope that works for you. We are all scrambling around trying find something that works and we pray that we don't get injured either.

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  3. will remember! such words will etch themselves on those whom ignored "the silly suggestion" as usually "the hard way"

    Trump may become a more well used paper target than "O"!

    say a year from now....

    Wildflower














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  4. Yep, it definitely sucks. My husband, thankfully, has pretty good insurance from his work. It's good, but it's still basically catastrophic insurance; our out of pocket deductible is something like $6000, so we pay for everything. We have an HSA set up so at least the money we pay for our actual doctor visits and medications is not taxed. I am thankful that we are fairly healthy.

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    1. I remember when I was a kid and on my dad's insurance from his blue collar job. They paid for just about everything. Dad didn't have to contribute to it either. Those were the days. The working persons been losing ground ever since the 70s.

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  5. The only advantage of being old is that I am on Medicare. That is the only health insurance that I have.

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    1. My lovely wife is on it, but I won't qualify as I'm not in the system. More loopholes.

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