CSotD: I share his pain. We all share his pain.
Skip to comments
It's hard to exaggerate the health care situation for comedic effect, but Edison Lee makes a good go of it this morning, with another episode featuring his re-configured and much more educational version of "The Game of Life."
Explanation for overseas readers: Yes. We live this way.
Some countries crash their economies by attempting to give their citizens too much. We crashed ours by attempting to trick them into buying homes they couldn't afford, but we certainly don't waste money maintaining their health.
Two jobs ago, I had health coverage, of a sort. No dental, no vision, no prescription coverage, but it underwrote the costs of office visits and bloodwork, with just a $10 or $20 co-payment from us.
That was about all it seemed to cover. I scheduled a colonoscopy, being of an appropriate age for such things, but then, when I went for the final check-in before the shoot, the doctor's office manager asked if I were aware that the thing cost just under four grand and my insurance was only going to cover absolutely not one penny of it.
Now, if it had cost $5010.48, that would have been different. They'd have picked up $5.24 of the cost. Or was it $8.38? Can't remember, but I do recall that I decided I could probably cobble something together with an iPhone and a piece of string a whole lot cheaper.
When I became self-employed, I knew I couldn't afford "regular" health insurance, but looked into catastrophic coverage, through a company that promoted its low-cost coverage. That would have come with a $5,000 deductible as well, but it wouldn't have covered all those things my previous policy covered, like office calls and blood work and not much else.
On the other hand, they only wanted 40 percent of my gross income. Such a deal!
If I'd been living across the river in Vermont, I could have gotten on Catamount Health Care, but I live in New Hampshire, where, on this topic, the motto "Live Free or Die" is taken very, very literally.
Pick one.
The saving grace in all this is that, when you do run into a health crisis, you can deduct the cost on your federal income tax. It used to be that you couldn't do that unless it totaled 2% of your adjusted gross income, but they've changed that.
Now it has to total 7.5% of your a.g.i., and note that you can only deduct the part that is over that, not the whole thing. So, if your adjusted gross income is, say, $30,000, and you have medical bills of $2255.42, you can deduct $5.42 from your income.
Starting in tax year 2013, it goes up to 10 percent.
If I'd bought that catastrophic coverage policy, I'd be able to deduct the cost of that, which would lower my taxable income by nearly a third, which is good, since it would give me a break on my payroll taxes plus my regular income tax.
Which, if I budgeted well, would leave me with enough disposable income to get one of those blue tarps to put over my cardboard box.
Those are nice in the rainy season. Nothing worse than trying to live in a soggy box.
To be fair, my doctor and the hospital give me a discounted price because I don't have insurance, which is good. But, as it happens, I'm facing a fairly expensive dental procedure which is being subsidized on the Bupkis Plan.
But a couple hundred dollars of it will be deductible.
But I have to tap my IRA to afford it at all, so the couple hundred that are deducted will still leave my a.g.i. at a higher amount than if I hadn't done it at all.
The conservatives are fond of noting that nobody who needs medical help is ever turned away, even if they can't afford to pay for it. And that's true.
The conservatives are also fond of taking the money that comes from the federal government to pay hospitals for treating indigent patients and converting it to the general fund, leaving the hospitals standing there with their stethoscopes in their hands.
Which means they have to lay people off, which adds to unemployment, or raise rates to cover the shortfall, which puts regular folks like you and Joe the Plumber in the position of having their insurance rates increase to pay for other people's medical costs.
Maybe both.
But it helps the conservatives get re-elected because they held taxes down. By stealing the money so that health costs would go up.
There are so many things wrong with our health insurance situation that the only thing more infuriating than what we've got is watching the rightwingers attempt to prevent the improvements from kicking in.
Under the reforms, I'll be eligible for affordable insurance.
That will go into effect one year before I become eligible for Medicare anyway, but, since I'm a mavericky kind of guy, I don't mind breaking with the pack and approving of something that benefits someone else more than it does me.
Doling out for-profit health insurance in small packages restricted by state lines is lunacy, and I'll concede that one of the proposed reforms in the "Please Don't Hurt Our Pals in Big Business" package has been to allow insurance plans to be sold interstate.
The way we let the banks tear down those restrictive walls, and that certainly improved things for the consumer.
I've sat in management meetings and heard about health plan negotiations, and it's grim stuff. If you're working for, say, Ford Motor Company, and you're dividing the costs among eight gazillion employees, it doesn't matter that Fred just found out he's got a dark spot on his x-ray.
But when you've got fewer than 100 employees, that dark spot jacks everybody's rates up substantially in the next round of negotiations.
Georgetown University has just under 16,500 students who are reportedly required to have health coverage, though some may be staying on their parents' plans.
But even if only half are on the internal plan, the cost to them of subsidizing, oh, say, birth control pills, is negligible. Certainly less than the impact on cost when students have to have ovarian cysts removed instead.
As for poor old Fred with the spot on his lung, imagine if he worked at Brigham Young University, where smoking is forbidden by the governing religion. If a Catholic school can eliminate coverage for birth control because it's against their teachings, could a Mormon school eliminate coverage of lung cancer and liver disease on the same basis?
If the GOP wins this fall, start planning to send your kids to BYU, not Notre Dame. The football is comparable and the health insurance will be a whole lot cheaper!
(Quick — Somebody tell Sara's mom!)
Comments 7
Comments are closed.