Have We Got A Deal for You!
The folks at Say Anything Blog point out the absolute disaster that is New York state healthcare policy and how Hillary wants to bring it to a home state near you. They've pretty much got it nailed, but I thought I'd add a little perspective, wot with me being a denizen of the liberal paradise that is the Empire State and all.
Donny Baseball is 36 and self-employed. There's me, the (ravishing) non-working Mrs. Baseball and the three small Baseball tykes. Everybody is healthy. To get the Baseball clan covered in NY by a mainstream provider like Oxford or Aetna would cost me a minimum of $2,500/mo. for a crappy plan. If I want some flexibility to use my doctors and if I want enough coverage for a hospitalization or some other goodies, I'm looking at $4,000/mo. and up. So that's somewhere between $30,000 and $48,000 annually that is essentially wasted if nobody gets seriously sick (actually that money reduces about $2,500 of expenses that we would incur anyway to about $600, so if everyone is healthy we really only waste somewhere between $28K-46K). That is alot of dough. Sure, someone could get sick, but if we go five years without health problems, we've pissed away $140,000 to $230,000. In contrast I can insure my life for $2 million over that same five years for $2500 in toto. That's $1.40 per day to insure for death, but $76 per day to insure for appendicitis or a hernia or a broken leg. How about getting a high deductible plan that just covers me if I get hit by a bus? Nope. Not available in New York state. So the choice is between accepting a high probability that a large sum of money will be wasted or accept a low probability of large healthcare expenses.
So what do you do if you can't afford upwards of $40,000 or just can't stomach the fact that it is vastly more likely that the money will have been wasted? You self-insure and hope. I sock away as much after-tax dinero as I can and hope that nobody gets seriously sick. And I count myself among the proverbial "uninsured" and shake my head in amazement at the misguided, do-gooding geniuses that have put tens of thousands of people like me in this position with moronic concepts such as "guaranteed issue" and "community rating". That's life here in New York. Wanna buy in America?
Donny Baseball is 36 and self-employed. There's me, the (ravishing) non-working Mrs. Baseball and the three small Baseball tykes. Everybody is healthy. To get the Baseball clan covered in NY by a mainstream provider like Oxford or Aetna would cost me a minimum of $2,500/mo. for a crappy plan. If I want some flexibility to use my doctors and if I want enough coverage for a hospitalization or some other goodies, I'm looking at $4,000/mo. and up. So that's somewhere between $30,000 and $48,000 annually that is essentially wasted if nobody gets seriously sick (actually that money reduces about $2,500 of expenses that we would incur anyway to about $600, so if everyone is healthy we really only waste somewhere between $28K-46K). That is alot of dough. Sure, someone could get sick, but if we go five years without health problems, we've pissed away $140,000 to $230,000. In contrast I can insure my life for $2 million over that same five years for $2500 in toto. That's $1.40 per day to insure for death, but $76 per day to insure for appendicitis or a hernia or a broken leg. How about getting a high deductible plan that just covers me if I get hit by a bus? Nope. Not available in New York state. So the choice is between accepting a high probability that a large sum of money will be wasted or accept a low probability of large healthcare expenses.
So what do you do if you can't afford upwards of $40,000 or just can't stomach the fact that it is vastly more likely that the money will have been wasted? You self-insure and hope. I sock away as much after-tax dinero as I can and hope that nobody gets seriously sick. And I count myself among the proverbial "uninsured" and shake my head in amazement at the misguided, do-gooding geniuses that have put tens of thousands of people like me in this position with moronic concepts such as "guaranteed issue" and "community rating". That's life here in New York. Wanna buy in America?
posted by Donny Baseball at 4:10 PM
2 Comments:
yes, our current system does not make it easy for entrapranuers. it forces them to take large personal risks and reduces their upside potential via capgains tax. but still, America is probably the most entrepreneur friendly country compared to the rest. does this mean free market capitalism is an unnatural state? i.e., maybe government and free market capitalism are incompatible in the long run.
I think it is mission creep. Our system has achieved so much that its elite has to constantly come up with new things to address. It is a given that the new mandates we take on will be ever more trivial in nature and the methods ever more intrusive. Yes, I agree that free market capitalism in not a natural state, it needs constant defending and renewing. Human nature is predisposed to want control and certainty and thus the seeds of capitalism's destruction is always with us.
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