New contributor Susan Mucha has some interesting and amusing takes on the views of the Republican voting core on the health insurance question:
Excellent thoughts on this topic. I share your frustration on shopping for health insurance–my "association plan" is $6500 a year with a $5000 deductible and it goes up about $1000 a year (I’ve never made a claim). Unfortunately as a member of the middle class, if I had a need for emergency medical care and didn’t insure myself, the hospital would take my
house and savings after presenting the bill, so I choose to pay for a noncompetitive "group" insurance policy rather than play roulette with my retirement. Individual insurance wanted to indefinitely exclude my gastro-intestinal tract (family history of hiatal hernia plus had a screening colonscopy/endoscopy about four years ago–no further treatment but a black mark on my health screening questionnaire).
our local Republican Women’s group called me last night to see why I wasn’t
re-joining–I’ve refused the last two years because of my frustration on
Administration policies related to health care (the Democrats don’t have better
answers because the insurance lobby feeds both sides too well). I told her that
I felt that the Administration was out of touch on this issue and until I saw
some evidence of it being given attention I wasn’t going to re-join. She shared
with me that she was currently uninsured because her husband was self-employed
and couldn’t find affordable health insurance. She says she "prays to God
every day that she won’t get sick." So, I guess Republican women are starting a
new "faith-based" initiative to address the health insurance issue. Personally I
think the HSA isn’t much better than praying to God to stay well. I’m not
worried about a $5K hospital bill. I’m worried about $100K hospital bill and
because no one knows how much procedures cost, it is impossible to understand
what you are buying in a hospital emergency situation.We definitely need to fix the problem and the report you’ve posted has excellent suggestions. There are a lot of us out here that are willing to pay
for reasonable health coverage insurance and a little better regulation of
insurance industry policies would go a long way in incentivizing continued
individual health cost responsibility. I see more and more people "praying to
God" instead of paying insurance premiums and ultimately we taxpayers are
covering those bets.
I actually think that this is a screaming big deal, and that the social conservatives without access to health insurance are the "swing voters" who will eventually vote for rather than against their economic interests, and vote for a national health insurance program. How long they’ll stay with faith-based insurance, I don’t know.
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I just read your “Faith-Based Health…”
I was touched, as I can tell it was from the heart that you wrote this! Having said that I would offer my take on Health Insurance from personal experience. First I live in California (Newport Beach, CA) you mentioned that your pay $6500.00 a year for Health Insurance, I pay $2750.00 a year for my health savings plan. You see it all about getting informed, we all need to become informed on exactly what true costs are, what “Exactly” does an average health insurance plan cover- and why are we paying so much?.. I take my financial portfolio quite serious and to me Health care is a big part of a total portfolio. The first step is to read as much as possible on health plans, interview several health insurance experts. You will find as I did, that some are sales people with no experience no college degree’s and hence use adjectives to explain plans. Keep researching, I did and it took interviewing approx. 15 agents – I found personally that large agencies use the least experienced person answer the phones, and health insurance corporations hire temporary employee’s who usually have a few hours in formal training (if any)- the whole system is quite interesting. I did hours and hours of researching and reading about plans, I asked hundreds of questions -and finally I was referred to a top agent in my area. I specifically asked “how long have you been in Health care, along with some general questions..what is a max. out of pocket?. what is a lifetime max. benefit mean?..what happens if I go outside of the preferred network” I found that most agents were lost with these basic questions. Ultimately I met with 20 agents, and one was extrodinary- I found out later he actually conducted class’s on health care throughout California, and often speaks about health care. I would highly recommend anyone use his services, as he works by referral and is quite busy, call Rudy at 1 800 459 0515- and tell him Don over from Newport Beach, Linda Isle recommends him.. this guy is not only good at health he is just a class act.
I can’t believe it, my co-worker just bought a car for $27360. Isn’t that crazy
Good post that expresses the real frustrations for the average citizen. I hope information that I have blogged at “My Genomic ID”, http://biometricid.blogs.com/ does not frustrate you more.
Thanks for the post. I recently saw a coffee mug that said “Bush’s health care plan: pray you don’t fall sick”.
Read with interest faith-based health care. Could you provide a link to the HealthCareBlog report she is referring to. Thanks. BP