Say Anything Blog

In response to an earlier post by Rob on the inanity of New York’s mandated healthcare insurance system, a system Hillary Clinton was pleased to announce she intended to impose on the entire country if elected president (shudder!), Donny Baseball, a successful New York-based financial services entrepreneur, offered an extraordinarily candid look at the effects of just such a system, at his own blog last Friday.

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?

What’s extraordinary about this post, besides the candor, is the fact that as a finance guy, Donny Baseball is accustomed to making decisions based on objective, dollars and cents criteria, and that most uncommon mental attribute, common sense. His is not some partisan rant, but the prudent, carefully considered viewpoint of a man genuinely concerned with the welfare of his family, and unable to provide them with the best protection, because that best protection is banned from the market due to government mandate.

Nor is this some glib, flash-in-the-pan commentary. Healthcare is a subject on which he has been writing knowledgeably and passionately for several years. Indeed, for those interested in the whole debate over healthcare coverage, I would recommend a trek back through his blog, Now Batting For Pedro Borbon, to see just what Hillary and the Democrats have in store for the rest of us.