Say Anything Blog

Assuming that he is as gracious as before, let me present, again, SAB reader, Donny Baseball, a New York City financial professional whose well-written blog, Now Batting for Pedro Borbon is always worth the time.

Healthcare policy is an area of particular interest, and in addition to the post below, and his Healthcare Clearinghouse posts of June 6, 2007 and June 27, 2007, his archives are peppered with posts and comments on healthcare, health insurance, the markets, and those who would regulate those markets.

Read and learn.

Donny Baseball is 36 and self-employed. There’s me, the (ravishing) non-working Mrs. Baseball and the three small Baseball tykes. Everybody is healthy. To get the Baseball clan covered in NY by a mainstream provider like Oxford or Aetna would cost me a minimum of $2,500/mo. for a crappy plan. If I want some flexibility to use my doctors and if I want enough coverage for a hospitalization or some other goodies, I’m looking at $4,000/mo. and up. So that’s somewhere between $30,000 and $48,000 annually that is essentially wasted if nobody gets seriously sick (actually that money reduces about $2,500 of expenses that we would incur anyway to about $600, so if everyone is healthy we really only waste somewhere between $28K-46K). That is a lot of dough. Sure, someone could get sick, but if we go five years without health problems, we’ve pissed away $140,000 to $230,000. In contrast I can insure my life for $2 million over that same five years for $2500 in toto. That’s $1.40 per day to insure for death, but $76 per day to insure for appendicitis or a hernia or a broken leg. How about getting a high deductible plan that just covers me if I get hit by a bus? Nope. Not available in New York state. So the choice is between accepting a high probability that a large sum of money will be wasted or accept a low probability of large healthcare expenses.

So what do you do if you can’t afford upwards of $40,000 or just can’t stomach the fact that it is vastly more likely that the money will have been wasted? You self-insure and hope. I sock away as much after-tax dinero as I can and hope that nobody gets seriously sick. And I count myself among the proverbial “uninsured” and shake my head in amazement at the misguided, do-gooding geniuses that have put tens of thousands of people like me in this position with moronic concepts such as “guaranteed issue” and “community rating”. That’s life here in New York. Wanna buy in America?

There is a reason, a very good reason, that even former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has disavowed “Romney-care.”

“Capitalism is optimism monetized.”

Nice post bat.

If the government would step out of the way the people would gravitate towards a major medical (illness and accident plan).

That’s cost a LOT less than what we get today. 

I think that alone would introduce the market forces we need to fix the problems of health care.  People would pay for the routine things, and insurance would be there for the major stuff. 

There would be cost containment on the routine stuff that winds up costing us so much.

Of course the psychiatrist and the acupuncture guys aren’t going to have a third party to charge.  But then neither is the doctors office.

1% of Americans pay 40% of the income tax.
5% of Americans pay 60% of the income tax.
10% of Americans pay 70% of the income tax.

Yep. That is why we have no insurance. We pay for what we get. And get only what we need.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

We finally took government off the backs of auto insurance companies here in SC.  The last time they were free was in 1966.  Now they can insure based on a driver’s past behavior(s).  I pay about $500 a year to insure two autos.  That is because now we do not have to subsidize the poor drivers.

Communism is evil

I agree completely with this article and I would say that your best bet for not being scammed by plans that include things you dont need is to seek health insurance through a health insurance brokerI did mine online and it worked out really well for me.