Trying to Come Up With Something to Post…

Landed me on this one, as I wait for this week’s host to publish CotC so I can do my thing updating links and announcing it.  Just some rambling around our health care costs…

We pay $764.94 a month for health insurance.

Last year we paid $1050.00 by check for co-pays and uncovered items to the medical center we use, less a refund from an overpayment I made, plus cash for some of the copays, probably balances out at about the $1050, give or take $50.

We paid the hospital $500 for the co-pay for Valerie.  Rates changed during the course of the year, but extrapolating forward that would be $10,729.28 for a year.

Plus prescriptions.  Which the latest news Deb tells me about negotiations on Romney’s evil health plan would have to be included as part of the minimum required insurance one must purchase.  That is, our insurance would cost more due to Romney’s lunacy.  A reasonable guess at the new cost of our insurance would be, say, $915 a month, bringing it almost up to the same cost as rent.  And to somewhere between breaking even and, more likely, costing more than the cost of prescriptions out of pocket and insurance combined.  Especially if there are co-pays on the prescriptions.  I complain sometimes, but we aren’t that bad off prescription-wise, after the sometimes massive discount AAA membership provides.

I’m rather impressed with the sheer volume we pay the doctor, apart from insurance.  The implication of the copay amounts is about $4000 a year retail in visits, plus lab work.  If we paid cash, even without a discount (like doctors are allowed to do that under the agreements they have with insurers), we’d be somewhere between breaking even and saving money, with the exception of maternity coverage.

Self-insurance makes a lot of sense, possibly combined with cheap catastrophic coverage.  The trouble is, we’re sometimes scraping to make the co-pay, so it requires actually putting the money aside and being ahead of it, and never having to touch the money for anything else.

Anyway, just rambling, inspired by some of the more exact figures I came up with for the past year.  I know how to solve the entire “health care crisis” in a few simple steps, but that’ll have to be another post sometime.

Posted by on 02/12 at 12:22 PM

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