Or we could have a rational sane system.

Nah. This is Amurrca. Better stick to the marketing gurus.

I pay $700 per month just for myself.

My tumor, which was attached to my stomach, had clear margins. Cutting out the tumor and the half of my stomach that had the tumor attached to it was considered curative, so I don’t worry much.

But, the fear of recurrence exists inside me. That’s not comfortable, but it doesn’t quite scare me to death. Yet.

Thanks for your advice.

If anyone wants to help me, I am starting a non-profit preschool for under-served kids. You can make a tax-deductible donation at http://www.tsoth.org

Once it’s up and running, I will get insurance! And I will help some kids! Come on, folks!

best,
Laurie

best,
Laurie

So, to get that extra coverage how much more would that cost?  Many people with families allready spend well over $250 per month for health insurance meanwhile their homeowners insurance may be 1/5th that cost.

Medical insurance is broken, medical billing practices are broken, the whole system is broken. 

It weirds me out how Americans put up with healthcare that fails the majority so savagely badly. OK, so a few millionaires and billionaires get better treatment, but is that worth the suffering of everyone else?

For me, I say Hurrah for the National Health Service and the value for money job it does for everyone. 

With respect, in this instance it is not broken.  The limit is there, it is known, it is in the policy it affected how much the insurance cost.

Just like other forms of insurance that have specific policy limits, you can or should be able to arrange for coverage that kicks in when the initial policy limit is met.

If you have a policy that pays $100,000 on your house but your house sustains $200,000 of damage, the insurance company is not responsible for that difference.

If you felt you needed more coverage why did you not buy it?

Oh the hell with this, let’s be socialists already, this…hey!  Did someone say “death panel?”  I guess the right wing has a point; corporations ARE more efficient…why waste time with a PANEL when you can just deny them health care right out of the gate?

I have good insurance so I paid about $300 out of pocket. But damn.

I’m okay now — the surgery fixed what needed fixing. The condition is controllable through insurance-covered medication, so it probably won’t recur and require another surgery. (It’s not cancer.) (It was caused by genetic predisposition, not by choices I made, not that that should matter.)

My unlucky roll of the dice could have been a lot worse. It makes me sick with worry to think about it. And then it makes me furious that I live in a country where I have to worry about that so much.

My good insurance is based on being legally married to a partner who managed to get a job with full benefits including unusually good, low-cost health insurance — a job he’s actually ready to move on from to start his own business, but doesn’t feel able to do so unless I get a job with equally good benefits, because what if something like this happens again?

So many life decisions have to be based on figuring out whether they’ll prevent you from being able to go to a doctor when you’re sick. And you can’t control all the variables.

My best wishes to Arijit — for healing, strength, and lack of insurance struggles.

How much would that cost me in America?

Don’t believe it.  They sure wouldn’t want what the American’s have. It’s an absolute disgrace what the USA spends on defense but won’t spend on keeping their own citizens healthy.  It’s also unforgivable at what the healthcare providers charge. I’ve seen co-pay bills that put a lot of Americans in bankruptcy, or caused them to lose their homes. 

For one, perhaps even more so than other public institutions, the Arizona public university system is fairly constrained for money. This means they can’t afford the sorts of plans that schools like Harvard, for instance, offer to grad students. Keep in mind, though, that ASU isn’t an outlier. Most colleges and universities haven’t offered especially comprehensive health insurance plans. (See this GAO report [.pdf]: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08389.pdf and a recent post at Think Progress on the weak coverage of some plans: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/06/04/494335/student-insurance-expanded-coverage/?mobile=nc).

Part of this, it’s worth noting, is because the insurers had overwhelming bargaining power and were likely treating these plans as an almost pure profit-making venture — at times pocketing more than 1/2 the $ they collected in premiums as profits, while paying out a minority of collected premiums in actual claims. (For instance, see here: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/04/09/nyregion/09colleges.html?ref=nyregion).

My suspicion is that the insurers were willing to offer more generous plans, but charged far more for those plans than public institutions were able to pay. Which is absurd, frankly, since students represent a healthier-than-average population and they are covered for a limited amount of time; hence, it’s exceedingly unlikely many students will ever be in a situation like me. As such, I’m pretty sure the actuaries working at these companies are well aware that the increased costs in terms of benefit payouts by the insurers if benefits caps were to increase would be fairly minimal, especially when spread across a relatively large population.

Interestingly, when the companies were limited in their Medical Loss Ratio (the amount in premiums collected that must be paid out in benefits — one of the provisions of Obamacare) and required to lift lifetime caps, the new plan offered by Aetna to ABOR (the one I mentioned above, that begins on August 16) costs no more than the previous far less generous insurance plan. In other words, thanks to some of the new regulations limiting how much insurers can mark up their product and pocket extra profits, we just called their bluff. We’ve now got a far more generous product (e.g., the $300k lifetime cap has been replaced with a $1 million annual cap, and all caps will disappear by 2014) for the SAME COST. 

So, either this means: (1)  ABOR and many other university systems in the past for some reason decided to go for a low-quality product even though they could have purchased a plan with greater benefits for the same price; or, (2) the insurance companies inflated the costs of more comprehensive products in the past because they were a pure profit-making venture, virtually unrestricted in terms of how much they were paying out versus how much they were collecting in premiums. Universities had little bargaining power and they ended up with a crappier product and the net result was that students like me suffered. 

Which of those two options do you think were more likely?

The difference is that in the UK or Canada, that’s the bulk of the cost, while in the US people have to pay (on average) another $3000 out of their own pockets.

As among the members, it’s all good. The problem is that the administering entity has other incentives, more so if it’s a corporation.

They could pay out 100% of what they take in in premiums, and still make out like bandits. Instead, they profit on investments AND stiff customers on their premiums.