Ilene Kilbride of Boulder complains about the outrageous cost of health insurance in a letter to the editor today.
People think they will be taxed heavily for a single-payer system, but we are being heavily taxed now — count up what you actually pay for your health care if you are unfortunate enough to actually need it. Ours costs $1,929 per month for three people — nearly $24,000 per year so we can have the joy of paying the first $6,000 (our deductible) and $40 co-pays. That is $30,000 for insurance plus what we pay for the office co-pays.
First of all, that is highway robbery for a healthy family of three. Which begs one to ask at least two questions:
1. What is the health situation in the Kilbride family.
2. Has Ilene looked into other plans?
Also, some questions regarding her plan…
1. Is the deductible a family deductible?
2. Is it $2000/person or $6000/person or $6000/family, which I suppose is the same as $2000/person.
3. Is this private insurance or a COBRA plan?
Also, keep in mind that her family does get network pricing and apparently unlimited co-pays at $40/Dr visit, and most likely some type of wellness benefit.
No doubt, individual policies are fickle animals if your health is not good. There are many cases where a person is not insurable or has critical conditions ridered out or deductible increased, etc. In most cases there are alternatives. For example, the state risk pool, Cover Colorado, would certainly offer respectable insurance to Ilene at much lower prices. If she has 12 months of creditable coverage and hasn’t had a gap in insurance coverage of more than 63 days, they will cover pre-existing conditions. If there has been a gap of more than 63 days then she might have to wait a year for pre-existing conditions to be covered.
That said, it doesn’t appear her family has health issues or she wouldn’t be dropping her coverage OR it seems to me she would have made a point of that in her letter.
Now if her family is healthy, she simply needs to look for another provider to get better rates. Perhaps ehealthinsurance.com should be her next stop. Of course, if you read the rest of her letter, I suspect she wouldn’t purchase private health insurance at almost any cost.
One just gets the feeling that a piece critical information is missing that prevents a full analysis of the situaion. Is Ilene playing the “victim” because she is being charged a very high price and refusing to investigate alternative plans, or is she one of the many that can’t find an affordable plan?
