Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), for example, doesn't want to come down against the popular public option, but doesn't want one that will 'erode the current system.' In previous statements, he's declared opposition to any competition with private insurance, which presumably means no price competition or improvements in quality of coverage.
So Wednesday, I called an insurance agent in Pennsylvania to find out what I was eligible for under this system Sen. Nelson is so enamored of.
I'm a single woman of 34, with a history of migraine but not currently taking any medication. The costs for the six plans I was quoted over the phone before medical underwriting, where they check a database to see what you've been diagnosed with and prescribed over the course of your life, ranged from $175-$349/mo.
If I wanted a HealthAmerica PPO plan with some out-of-network coverage, the plans were generally more expensive. A hospital stay would either set me back $200/day to a maximum of $1,000 (the most expensive plan), or the full $3,000 deductible (the cheapest plan). None of these PPO plans covered either maternity or childbirth costs.
To get coverage for having a child, which would be of concern for some women my age, I would have had to go with one of two Aetna plans, both HMO plans, where some HMO bureaucrat in Connecticut would reject any costs incurred from out-of-network healthcare. The out-of-pocket for hospital stays was either $400 or $500/day, to a maximum of 5 days, with yearly deductibles of $4,000 and $5,000, respectively.
I could have called for a quote from UnitedHealthcare, the company called out by Elizabeth Edwards in a recent Daily Show appearance. But just last week, I was talking with a self-employed hair stylist who owns his own salon, and he canceled with them because he found it too expensive. As an added insult and months after the fact, he recently got a letter from them denying the one doctor's visit he made while he was covered.
I could also have looked in my own mail. Just last month, I got a letter from UnitedHealthcare, the coverage I'd had for a year through my brief tenure as a student at George Washington University, rejecting a $319 claim for a diagnostic test which my doctor considered medically necessary. Some UnitedHealthcare bureaucrat in Minnesota thought they knew better than my doctor, and I'm sure they're hoping that I'm too disorganized (they may be right) to attempt to get them to pay this bill before the collection agency starts sending me nasty letters and calling several times a week.
And if I should prove to be as disorganized as they're hoping, I'm past caring about threats against my credit rating. If I have money, I'll pay them, if I don't I'll tell them to try back next month. I've hit "the number", my credit is utterly destroyed already, and it doesn't matter any more.
Sallie Mae, a student loan provider so stingy that they don't even include return envelopes with their bills, stopped giving hardship deferments last year. So did Nelnet. My total monthly income is about $2,000, my cumulative monthly debt payments to all lenders from the time when I was a student are about $1,400. I stupidly thought there'd be jobs or something when I got out of school.
As to the remaining $600, give or take, I can't function without a phone, or at least I'd rather not. Occasionally, I like to buy food, maybe see a movie or have a drink now and again. Where I'm going to come up with $200-300/month to pay for insurance, I don't know.
(I'm confident that I can fix this situation, but if I get sick in the meantime, I'm going to be so, so screwed.)
People are naturally not supposed to complain about this sort of thing in public. I'm supposed to feel so ashamed of the crime of being unable to pay my bills and have a reasonable standard of living afterwards, that I should just stfu. Screw the thousands of dollars of dental bills I'd racked up from years of not being able to afford a dentist or the costs of moving thousands of miles in an attempt to make something of my education. It's my fault for not predicting that I'd have fewer economic opportunities as a college graduate in 2008 than I did as a high school graduate during the 1998-2005 timeframe.
Nelson and the 'moderates' in Congress want to wait until more people have ended up in poverty or died because of our deeply broken economics, where a public official is unashamed to say in front of God and everybody that they're more concerned with the health of the insurance industry than the health of American citizens.
Insurance companies make a lousy product that kills people and leaves Americans with lower life expectancies than people in 49 other countries. Their interests should stop mattering more than those of the people whose lives they wreck and whose entrepreneurial spirit they stifle.
Update: I'd love to mix it up with y'all down below, but I can't get the comment features to work on my computer. It's probably a Windows Vista thing, no one else seems to have this problem. Anyway, thanks for sharing your own stories.
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