Talk about your boring blog topics—it doesn’t get worse than—health insurance. But the subject came up this morning with my friend. I will do my best to make this interesting. I will do so with plenty of sarcasm and wisecracks, no doubt, but don’t confuse that with flippancy. This is a deadly serious topic for my friend.
Thankfully, she has great insurance. She is covered under her husband’s generous plan through his employer. So far, her cancer ordeal has cost her only the total of her maximum out of pocket limit which is absurdly low! Her plan runs from June to June, so at the end of May she will be on the hook for another out of pocket limit. But again, it is a small and very manageable number. Everything else will be paid by her insurance company, permanently taking her off their Christmas card list.
So far, she has been battling this nightmare for just over five months. There have been tons of doctor’s visits, six chemo treatments and a seemingly endless parade of medications to help her deal with its effects. But, there hasn’t been any surgery or extended hospitalizations. When she told me the total price tag so far I was mortified. $600,000...and she hasn’t even had surgery yet! Just imagine how much an eight hour surgical procedure will run, not to mention the six additional weeks of radiation. Worst case scenario would include an additional year of chemo. My mathematical skills aren’t what you would call elite, but just some entry level extrapolation makes it clear that this thing might end up costing over two million dollars. Let me write that out for you. $2,000,000. That’s ten Lamborghini’s. That’s three lake houses in Maine. With two million dollars you could buy enough sausage to feed everyone in Pittsburgh for a year. While it’s certainly true that you can’t place a monetary value on a human life, two million clams is still a lot of money.
Is it worth it? What kind of utilitarian nonsense question is that? Of course it’s worth it. But, suppose my friend didn’t have health insurance? Or suppose she had accidentally let it lapse because she forgot to pay the premium? Suppose her husband’s employer decided to stop providing subsidized insurance to their employees? Suppose he got laid off and couldn’t afford the Cobra premiums? Thankfully, none of these things happened and my friend is mercifully shielded from the financial death that enduring this would surely bring without health insurance. But what about those not so fortunate?
I would imagine that the only thing worse than going through a life and death cancer war would be going through a life and death cancer war...without health insurance.
As most of you know, I have had a life long aversion to and suspicion of powerful, centralized government. Second only to my aversion and suspicion of big government has been my aversion to and suspicion of big business. In this country there is no business bigger than health insurance. So I am in a classic bind on the subject of government run health insurance. Should we leave the frying pan of profit driven big business-run care for the fire of government bureaucrat-run care? Should we trade in the bean counting accountants at Anthem for the paper pushing apparatchiks at the Department of Health and Human Services? Would you rather have to deal with the soulless money grubbers at the insurance company or DMV style morons? It is a vexing questions with no good answers. But when I hear of $600,000 chemo bills I start to wonder...is it even possible for government run health care to be any worse? At least with the government nobody would have to declare bankruptcy after getting a cancer diagnosis. The country might go bankrupt...but we could cross that bridge when we get to it.
One more thing. I just got my Anthem bill in the mail. I got my annual rate increase. It wasn’t horrible...only went up 7%. So starting next month i will be paying $1458 a month for a $3500 deductible plan for the two of us. Add to that the $400 a month I will deposit in my Health Savings Account to cover that deductible and you’re talking over $22,000 of my income after taxes goes to insure that I won’t be bankrupted by an unexpected diagnosis.
Something is extraordinarily screwed up about that. Don’t you think?
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