I meant pay everything out of pocket. I'm sure you're right, I was just using hyperbole because $700/month seems like a LOT of money. Believe me, I learned all to well the last few years how expensive medical care costs can be, even WITH insurance. And we just had twins 2 months ago, so we're just getting started....
It is alot of money if you do not get sick, but one major illness and you are bankrupt without insurance (sometimes even with insurance).
The doctor who performed the procedure thought so too but it was ordered by the emergency doctor that tended to me. Everything turned out good though so no worries.....except the bill.
The problem with all these insurance/healthcare plans is that none of them do anything to effect the cost structure of the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry needs to be more efficient, by eliminating middlemen, lowering administrative costs, increasing supply, and reducing operating wastes.
Every cut you are talking about is someone's job/pay, I am sure they would fight for their jobs/pay. Do you want to cut doctor's pay? Do you want to cut administrators? Do you want to cut drug company's profit? It is not going to be easy at all.
But nothing is going to change until we do are willing to tackle these things. We need to produce more doctors and healthcare professionals. We need to empower nurses to treat more basic ailments. We need to reduce the administrators by making process and IT systems for efficient. We need to get a lot of the marketing and associated costs out of pharmaceuticals. We need reduce the amount insurance companies can skim off the top.
i get good health and dental coverage at no extra cost to me, but if I were to add my healthy non smoking wife to my policy, it would be almost $600 per month out of pocket...
Yep, my wife is the majority of the coverage. The kids' rates are much lower. I guess the company is trying push working spouses to get their own coverage through their own employer.
I think most companies do that. Having my wife on my plan would be almost twice as much as the cost of her being on her own plan. They seem to really discourage having working spouses on the same plan for some reason.
It's not that they discourage it, it's that they don't want to pay for your spouse. Companies pay for their employees. They don't care if insure your kids/spouse but they don't want to put their dollars toward it. Normally.
I believe the thinking is that married and married with family employees make better employees? At least, I would think that companies that don't offer up reasonable benefits for employees with families would soon see most employees with families going elsewhere. Since it seems to me the quality of benefits offered has historically been a key criteria in how companies "market" themselves.
I 100% without question believe in assisted suicide. When I get to the point where I can no longer function without people tending to my every move, it's time for me to go. It's one of the few things that honestly scares me, and I'm in my 20's. I don't have it in me now and don't think I will 50, 60 years from now to jump off a building or drown myself ect. When I decide it's time to die then I'd like to be able to go somewhere and just lay there without pain and slowly drift off.