Aug 05 2009
Health Insurance? Well, Sort Of . . .
We’re finally eligible for health insurance through my husband’s job, now that he’s been working there for 6 months. The only problem is, it’s not gonna do us any good for another 12 months. There’s this little thing called a “pre-existing condition” clause in it, that says because we haven’t had insurance, they don’t have to cover anything we’ve already been diagnosed with until we’ve paid them for 12 months. At $300 a month, that’s $3600 we have to pay out before we can actually use the insurance for anything other than colds and other stuff that we get after the insurance is in effect.
That means that I STILL can’t get treatment for my bipolar, fibromyalgia, or arthritis; and my husband can’t be treated for his high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or adult ADD. Of course, once we pay out half of his check in insurance and child support every week, we can’t pay the copays anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter whether anything is covered or not.
If the health care reform bill passes, I wonder if it will make any difference to policies already in effect. If it does, is the insurance premium going to go up so much we can’t afford to eat once it’s paid? I’m not sure how I feel about the bill anyway. I think there are some good provisions in it, but I wonder about some of them.
Like requiring everyone to buy a policy. For people who don’t make enough money to live on, how is forcing them to pay insurance premiums going to help anything? Charging an extra 2.5% in taxes if they DON’T get insurance isn’t going to work, they don’t earn enough to have to pay taxes. The best that will do is reduce the amount of the refund check, and if the refund isn’t enough to cover it, is the government going to send them to jail? Then what? The kids get put in foster care and we spend even more tax money to support them and their parents? I don’t understand it, but then, maybe I’m just stupid.
The system is definitely broken, but I don’t know if government control is the way to fix it. I’ve seen too many government programs that sounded wonderful in the beginning go the way of social security. Too many hands in the cookie jar, too much bureaucracy, and too much of the money going to pay administrative costs instead of into the programs themselves means higher costs for fewer services.
But maybe it’s better than the alternative . . . The free market system hasn’t worked very well, that’s for sure. If your job doesn’t provide health care benefits, it’s almost impossible to get insurance at a price you can afford, especially if you have any health problems. An individual policy for me (just me, not the whole family) would cost us more than our entire monthly income. How does that help, even considering that the premiums are STILL less than the monthly cost of doctors and medications? (Before you say that maybe we should be spending our money on health care instead of internet, you should know that the internet is included in the rent, and the computer is 3 years old, bought back when I had a $60,000 a year job.)
I don’t know the right choices to make, I just know there are thousands of folks like me, that have major health issues and can’t afford to get treatment for them, and SOMETHING has to change.
