Hear me out on this, please.
Let’s say that I spend $5k on health insurance in a year, but don’t go to the doctor or have any medical issues in that year. Where does my money go? It disappears. I basically just gave away my money, and received nothing in return. However, if I took that $5k and simply put it into a personal savings account instead of giving it away to a health insurance provider - that money stays right there if and whenever I decide to use it. It even collects interest.
I realize that with a health insurance provider, you’re (supposedly) getting discounted rates on medical services - but if your money is just disappearing into thin air if you don’t happen to need those medical services in a given year, are you really saving money? It just seems like a really big scam to me - what am I missing?
Like all insurance it deals with the possibility of a bill so large no savings could cover it. Its like life insurance does not make sense unless you die young assuming you paid into it your whole life. The savings is better right up to the point you get some catastrophic medical issue which could happen in your twenties.
Because hospitals charge a thousands dollars for an aspirin.
Insurance only has to pay like a dollar. But YOU would be lucky to haggle it down to $40.
IOW: a racket
So pretty much: the RAM crysis situation but it can literally kill you
Let try this, why don’t we pool our money into a big savings account of pretax dollars for everyone in the entire country and add a supervising org that works with hospital networks to keep cost low through collective bargaining. At some point we the hospital networks become a single national network.
Ok so I hear you, but where do I get to deny claims and make $638,384,274,836.67 for myself while you die of a completely treatable disease? It’s not a fair system to me so I’m going to
bribelobby Congress and get my way.The fix is clearly to have a group of non-medical people in charge of that pooled pot of money who can deny payments for arbitrary reasons.
I think this is the most sane solutionMost sane seems a bit of a stretch, but I will grant you that given the current system sane-er definitely works.
Lol well we have video from last year that showed what we should do with you in that case.
Sounds like communism to me smh
Insurance is always a technical gamble. If you need it for something moderate to big you’ll easily run up a much higher bill than 5k. Could even be enough to eat the years of savings you had.
If you had paid that 5k that year, you’d still have your savings.
Until we get to the total plan limits. They don’t cover costs to infinity, you know. And for something like cancer treatment, most plans don’t actually offer enough coverage to sustain it for years, so you’re still on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars after all is said and done.
A single complex surgery can have billed charges approaching $1,000,000, and that’s if they will even perform the surgery if you’re ininsured. Your $5,000 a year won’t even cover the interest charges and your only way out if the hospital won’t reduce the debt is bankruptcy.
Because everything costs more than you think. Having a child without insurance is often over $100,000. Any visit to the ER for an emergency? $25,000 to get in the door and often millions of dollars if you need lots of interventions. Heck, even with insurance, chronic conditions often cost thousands of dollars per year. Even simple procedures like my daughter’s tympanostomy tubes have self-pay prices in the tens of thousands of dollars.
You may have conflated ‘costs’ with ‘profit’ - countries with actual healthcare don’t allow providers to inflate their costs like the USA does.
I have Acute Myloid Leukemia.
In the State of Oregon, to treat that with a side trip through “lets get a bone marrow transplant land” it costs $2 million dollars.
I had a doctor state that they don’t know what causes Leukemia, but it’s not genetic, so there is nothing I could have done to prevent it and my family didn’t give it to me.
Are you going to save up $2 million dollars in case you get diagnosed with something that does not have any symptoms? Because I didn’t have any. One month I was fine, and the next I couldn’t get to from my car to my desk at work without stopping somewhere along the way to rest.
To a certain degree, I see your point about paying for something that you are not really using. It sucks. But if you need it, it is really nice that you already have it.
There is a reason why some people literally go bankrupt with medical bills. Even with insurance, it can still get pretty costly.
Ask yourself what happens if you get diagnosed with cancer in that first year instead of staying healthy.
Spend the savings account on a sweet funeral?
Unfortunately, $5k doesn’t buy you a sweet funeral. You’re lucky to be cremated and remains in a plain plastic coated cardboard box for $5k.
$5k might cover the costs of moving a country with proper healthcare though.
Sounds very expensive there… Pretty sure funerals relatives of mine have had were priced in 2-3 digits.
That is an extremely foreign concept to my indoctrinated american brain… My grandmother pre-paid for her entire funeral, casket and burial plot included, back in the early 1980s and didn’t pass until 2005. It cost her like $3000 in 1980s money and we were told at the time the same arrangements would have cost about $25000 in 2005. Another family member died that same year and was cremated and that cost about $4000 just for the basic plain box mentioned above. I’m sure today it is at least double that… (guessing based on how much more EVERYTHING else costs vs 20 years ago).
Jeez just haul me out to the woods and plant a tree overtop of me, I need nothing but to return my borrowed stardust back to nature
Oh, no, that’s illegal. You’re legally required to spend at least 10k on your death, it’s good for the economy.
You can spend a few thousand here, but at that point you are getting a fairly large service and feeding everyone too. Burial is also another way to add a lot to the cost.
Because you probably won’t get a multi-million-dollar cancer, but might. Or, looked at another way, someone will get cancer, and with insurance everyone is just a little less well off, instead of a few people being absolutely ruined.
I know little about American healthcare, but that’s how insurance in general works. (From what I’ve heard, there’s also a premium that just goes to anticompetitive bullshit in that specific case)
Exactly. Health insurance covers more than I could ever save. The fact that we all she pretty well means that well need more medical support for a longer time when were old. Once your personal savings account is empty you won’t have acces to expensive treatments anymore.
The more people buy in to healthcare, the cheaper the individual cost gets.
…in theory.
Thats how health care works in civilized countries. In the US its more like “everyone is way worse off, the people who get really sick are still ruined because insurance fucks them over and you still have to pay for going to the doctor”.
Private health insurance doesn’t get involved with doctors or hospital treatments at all where I live. It’s more for various outpatient goods, and dentists/eye doctors if you’re too rich to qualify for the federal program.
So being Canadian I have a different outlook. My province used to charge $1500 per year for health coverage so that everything was “free” at point of service. Then we changed political parties and they dropped it to $750 per year, years later to $0 per year. (The idea being if you are struggling then any monthly payment could would be a hardship).
So now we pay nothing for healthcare and my income taxes went up $270 on first 50K, but at least I’m not paying $1500 or $750.
So cheap health care and still save 5K for retirement
DAMN SOCIALIST PIGS!
Your idea is to not have insurance. This makes sense for expenses you can cover from your own savings. It makes less sense for expenses you can’t cover from savings. This is why insurance was created, it is a way to pool catastrophic risks where the majority who won’t need it (as much) cover the costs of the minority that does.
For health insurance specifically, it doesn’t make economic sense to not cover the entire population, which is why top economies implement such a system in various ways.
In the past 3 years my father has been billed millions of dollars in healthcare. If he had a health savings instead of insurance, he would simply be dead now. The better option is public single payer healthcare. Insurance sucks, but health savings is simply worse. Pooled risk spreads out costs. If the government pools the risk then they eliminate the needs for constant financial profit growth at the expense of the insured.
Yep! Having medical costs be a “fend for yourself” system is super ableist. I had a double lung transplant in 2014 thanks to the affordable healthcare act, thanks Obama, and if my “personal savings” had been the only thing I had to pay for it I’d be dead. Lots of people, like myself, are born disabled, we deserve to exist, having a system where I still get healthcare even if it costs a couple million to put me in ICU for six months and do 12 hours of surgery is the only humane option. Some bills just can be covered by the very vast majority of us, and like you said single payer healthcare is the obvious answer, insurance sucks but it still covers a very important gap
The problem is it’s not 5k, it’s like 500k and you won’t save that in time. Some people do what you say and as long as it’s checkups and colds they’re fine, but if they get in an accident and need surgery, they can’t pay the whole bill. Insurance doesn’t pay it either, they negotiate. But the hospital won’t negotiate with you like they will with them. You get full bill.
Well yes, but our system is rigged against us. HSA accounts are kind of what you’re looking for.
My cancer surgery this year and my wife’s hospitalization combined to hit $600,000.
You aren’t paying that with a savings account.
I am also not paying that with insurance. My rattlesnake bite cost $43,000. Insurance covered almost $3,000.
Our out of pocket maximum for the year is $6,500. We hit that instantly.
