Are Mini Med Policies Insurance? No.

I worked for over a year for the State of Pennsylvania as a temp. Oddly, one can be a temporary worker, at least for the state, for years. (No, I don't know how that works.) Being a temp worker sucks, not just because of the low pay and complete lack of holiday/vacation/sick pay (do you have any idea how many state holidays there are? Pennsylvania includes the first day of hunting season. tru fax.), but also because of the "health insurance" temp agencies offer.

I used sarcastiquotes because calling that plan health insurance is like calling Sarah Palin a feminist. Lots of people do it, but it still doesn't make any sense.

That "health insurance" cost $50 a paycheck, had an overall cap of $10,000*, a deductible of $1,000 and a monthly pharmacy cap of $75. So, yeah, they wanted to steal $2,600 a year from me for no really good reason. And they called it health insurance, I guess just for the added benefit of insulting my intelligence.

So, when McDonalds claims that the crap they're offering their employees is health insurance, only in the sense that Sarah Palin is a feminist. But McDonalds is more than willing to sell the idea to Congress, who is pretty darn interested in listening, though not actually in having "health insurance" themselves.

Among hearing witnesses, Team Better-Than-Nothing was headed up by Rich Floersch, executive vice-president for human resources at McDonald's Corporation. McDonald's helped win itself a crucial waiver from the health-reform law, Janet Adamy reported two months ago in the Wall Street Journal, by threatening to HHS that if forced to comply it might just have to withdraw health coverage from thousands of fast-food workers. McDonald's offers hourly workers at its 1,500 company-owned restaurants four health-insurance options, Floerschexplained. Only one of these options (annual premium: about $6,000 per year, obviously more than most hourly workers can pay) is "comprehensive" (i.e., real) insurance. The other three are mini-meds. The cheapest option (and the one nearly all its hourly workers opt for) cost $710 per year in 2008 (presumably it's more expensive now, but apparently this was the most recent data the commerce committee could get) and had an annual benefit ceiling of $2,000. The other two options cost $1,332 and $1,947 per year and had annual benefit ceilings of $5,000 and $10,000. These same four options are also available from most of McDonald's' 12,500 franchisees.

. . .

Floersch said that McDonald's surveyed its employees and found only 10 percent willing to pay $21 or more per week for health insurance, as opposed to 55 percent who would be willing to pay $5 to $20 per week. He didn't mention (but a commerce committee fact sheet did) that the sliding premiums for the three insurance options available to corporate suits and some restaurant managers but not to hourly employees actually begin at levels below those paid by hourly workers for mini-med plans even though the suits' policies contain no annual benefit limits. That's right. Some nonhourly employees at McDonald's pay less for theirreal health insurance—with no annual limits and, indeed, an employee out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000 for covered expenses—than the schmucks shoveling French fries and flipping Big Macs pay for fake health insurance with annual benefit limits of $2,000, $5,000, and $10,000, and no employee out-of-pocket maximum for covered expenses.Oh, and the absolute highest health premium the suits might pay ($1,435 for higher-earning employees in the "no deductible PPO") is less than a quarter the premium McDonald's expects the schmucks to pay for the only policy hourly workers can opt for that isn't a mini-med. [emphasis mine]

That's just evil.

*The ER charges $500 just for walking through the door, the walk in clinic next door to my work charges $85 to see a doctor, and a decent blood workup will run you upwards of $500. One mild bout of anything would bust right through that cap.

$22,000 Baby

health care, insurance, reform, pregnant,

Another reason we need health care reform.

Our six-month-old daughter cost over $22,000.

You’d think, with a number like that, we must have used fertility treatments—but she was conceived naturally. You’d think we went through an adoption agency—but she is a biological child. So surely, we were uninsured.

Nope. Birthing our daughter was so expensive precisely because we were insured, on the individual market. Our insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, sold us exactly the type of flawed policy—riddled with holes and exceptions—that the health care reform bills in Congress should try to do away with. The “maternity” coverage we purchased didn’t cover my labor, delivery, or hospital stay. It was a sham. And so we spent the first months of her life getting the kind of hospital bills and increasingly aggressive calls from hospital administrators that I once believed were only possible without insurance.

[continued]

They paid for insurance, and then paid again when their insurance didn't cover a thing. Yeah, we just have the bestest health care system in the world.

If It Takes Socialism to Get Us All Healthcare

socialism, health care, insurance, bankruptcy, single, payer, obama, liberal,
Then fuck it, I'm a socialist.

From Americablog:

Medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years, U.S. researchers reported Thursday.

More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

"Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income," the researchers wrote. "Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations."

The researchers, whose work was paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said the share of bankruptcies that could be blamed on medical problems rose by 50 percent from 2001 to 2007.

You know why we need this? It's not just the 40,000,000 or so people without medical insurance, it's the millions more people like me, who have insurance and can't afford to use it.

Monday night I was swiffering my floor and I accidentally knocked a surround sound speaker off the stand. It landed right on my bunion, and I ended up with a deep purple/blue bruise on my foot up to my bunion, and a bruise on my toe past the bunion. The pain was indescribable. I'm still limping and that bruise looks bad, and I'm not sure why it's to either side of the bunion. That worries me.

I thought about going to the hospital, but then I thought, nope. I can't afford to pay the hospital to xray it, or for the ER charge. If something did need to be done, it'd be a visit to an orthopaedic surgeon, and my copay for specialists is $50. I don't have $12 for hair dye. I didn't have it last week or the week before, either. (Yes, I'm a little vain.) And you know it wouldn't be just one visit to the specialist. And forget about surgery. I've seen my copays for that. If I could afford that sort of thing, I'd own a car.

So, I grabbed one of the crutches in the basement closet (leftover from when my MIL had knee surgery) and used that for a few days.

I have health insurance. I may as well not.

Imagine what my story will be if I am diagnosed with breast cancer next month. What will I do then? I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll choose between eating and dying. I'll choose between being homeless and letting cancer eat me alive. I'll choose between what is no doubt a really horrible death and having heat in the winter.

So the next time somebody whinges at you about socialism and rationing* and Canada, ask them what they'd choose: cancer treatments or eating, cancer treatments or having a roof over their head, cancer treatments or not freezing to death.



*We already are rationing health care treatments in this country. We're rationing it according to who can afford it. When somebody starts bitching about rationing, what they're really saying is, "I'm on the good side of the rationing right now, and I'd rather not end up on the bad side of it."