HMO: Go Back To Your Crappy Job For Insurance
It’s not particularly news that the lack of health insurance is affecting the middle class, but this NYT piece provides a good reminder: a women with a history of cancer, making $60,000 a year, was unable to afford health insurance. Here were her options:
- One plan offered to insure her for $27,000 a year. After taxes, that’s easily more than half of her income.
- Another HMO told her to go back to her old job and get insurance through them.
So there’s your options if you have a history of a serious illness and you’re trying to buy insurance (note: the “make everyone purchase insurance” option is sadly one of the leading plans to get everyone covered in the US): pay half of your salary, or go back to an old job, quit your small business, so you can afford your own medical care.
What a joke.
Or if you already have privately-paid insurance, they double the premiums if you develop a chronic illness. Then within the next 2 years they triple it–then they quadruple it, and so forth. (This happened to one of my patients who needed monthly IV infusions—and so she had to quit her job as a real estate agent and get on Disability.)
Making everyone purchase insurance hurts exactly those it purports to help.
Lower income families and individuals will purchase the least expensive coverage – whatever they can afford – and what will happen is that they’ll have high deductibles, high copays, and have huge holes in what the policies will cover.
So – these people will be stretching their budgets by paying for the insurance, and then end up still having to pay for their medical care out of their pockets.
I don’t pretend to know what it is, but there’s got to be a better way.
Thank you for your comments…I happen to be Vicki’s fiancee…A couple of quick fixes are: not alloing Cobra coverage to have an expiration date…Allowing trade organizations to qualify as group health the way large corporations do…Thanks again Tim Medlin