Wow! You should take a look at the comments on this post over at Get Rich Slowly. J.D. asked readers to report on how much they pay for health insurance. It’s just gut-wrenching. One reader remarked that she had paid tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare coverage but never made a claim; another said after she’d paid for the insurance, she couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. Another reader, who used to work for a company that did business with health insurers, described the insurers’ strategy of submitting requests for double-digit rate increases every few months, so they could settle for regular, steady single-digit increase targeting specific zip codes.
Meanwhile, if that doesn’t frost your cookies enough, the comments from Canadians—and from the guy in Japan—certainly will. One Canadian woman had cervical cancer…the only cost to her was the parking fee at the clinic where she had to go once a week for treatment. Other Canadians do remark that health care in that country is far from “free” for your taxes. But pretty clearly few or no Canadians can expect that a major illness or accident will pauperize them.
Really. You just can’t imagine why anyone who’s not a congressional representative and in the pocket of big donors and lobbyists would oppose a national health care plan. Medicare’s not cheap—largely because of the ever-increasing rates charged by insurance companies that have managed to get their fingers in that pot, too. But at least it’s marginally affordable and does cover most conditions.
Back at GRS, comment number 234 mentions something kind of interesting. It’s a healthcare co-op for folks whose feelings about forcing women to bear unwanted babies are so strong they won’t subscribe to commercial insurance lest their morals be contaminated when some other subscriber gets an abortion to save her life. Or to have a choice about what her and her family’s life will be. It’s called Samaritan Ministries.
For a family, according to this reader, monthly cost is $320. Coverage is rather skimpy: you pay out of pocket for medical costs under $300 a month (so if you come down with a chronic ailment, your monthly cost is now $620 a month, minimum—not counting drugs, vision, and dental), pre-existing conditions are not covered, and the most it pays out is $250,000. Get yourself a case of cancer or a heart attack, and that $250,000 will be gone in a trice…you’ll soon find yourself paying a lot more than parking fees!
In the absence of a national health care plan, though, it’s an interesting scheme. If you were young and healthy, it might be worth considering. It certainly is better than nothing, and far more affordable than commercial plans that gouge you thousands of dollars for limited coverage or for insurance you can’t afford to use.
Incidentally, Samaritan Ministries publishes a guide to finding healthcare providers. One of these is an outfit that, for a fee, will collect bids from doctors for you.
Meanwhile, a Christian blogger in Alabama casts a jaundiced eye on this outfit. Writing as DrAbston, this observer points out that it functions as a loophole for Americans to get out of buying the required insurance under the new Affordable Healthcare plan, that requirements skew the membership toward cherry-picking, and that its ballyhooed Christian philosophy contains an inherent contradiction.
So it appears that the faith-based (or anything else-based) health-sharing scheme, while perhaps useful for a limited number of special-interest groups, is not a viable answer to our country’s health care issue.
When you read the responses to JD’s post—245 and counting!—you realize something has got to be done.