Can someone explain the health care 'crisis' to me?

[Jeffiner99]

I don't know about anyone else, but I can tell you my friend's story. He was a professional attorney. Worked in a large firm. Had health insurance through the firm because it was mandated by law. Firm chose a few policies to choose from and you had to pay a share of it. They decided that it wasn't fair to the people with kids to pay more money for health insurance so they chose a plan whereby if you have one spouse or one spouse and 16 kids it costs the same. (So the burden of those kids' insurance was borne by the childless couples).

Idiot, that he was, he did not realize that it would cost him the same to have private insurance. He paid an additional 400 buck per month to have my insurance.

Then he got sick. Very sick. Had to stop working. Went on Cobra. Got 18 months of insurance. When the cobra runs out he will need private insurance. There is this Hipaa policy that he can get that will help (available only to people who were on Cobra) so his insurance for himself only will only go up to 1400 per month. (This is almost breaking even for him, but if he needs an operation it will cost 2 mil. or he dies, so he must pay.)

If he moves out of the state he will lose the hipaa insurance and need to get regular private insurance. That will cost him 4500 per month.

Had the gov't not interfered and "forced" his company to have insurance he would have got it privately. It would have cost him several thousand less a year because he did not have kids. When he got sick his premiums would not have gone up, and he would still be covered.

Oh, and for all you SS lovers out there. Because he got sick he had to stop working. Lucky he had private disability insurance that pays 60% of his salary. It started the 2nd week he was out of work. As a part of that private contract he was forced to apply for SS disability to offset if possible. SS came through. It pays 1/4 of what the private disability paid. It costs 15 times as much for the coverage, oh, and yeah, it took 18 months before the first check arrived.

Lesson: get your own bloody insurance. Don't depend on the stuff you get from your job. And get your own private disability insurance. Cheap as hell and worth every penny. And if you buy it yourself (he did not it was paid for by his job) then if you get sick all your payments are tax free, because his firm paid the premium his payments are fully taxable.

Plus, he made the horrid mistake of trying to work as long as he could and even went down to part time to keep working. This "good deed" was punished because the insurance co. only pays him 60% of his last paycheck, not what he was making before he got sick. So it is better to be a deadbeat.