My income, which is quite low (below 40K currently), gets me just a $1 saving off of my nearly $300 per month premium for the lowest priced available plans for 2017?

Fuck you, Obamacare. Fuck double damn you.

Is $300/month a lot for healthcare? At my employer (quite large) we pay about that for a single person, plus the likely double that our employer plays. How much should you pay?

It also depends how much the deductible is too.

I pay about $350 a month for me and my family. It has a $25 co-pay. There is a $3000 minimum. So I need a new Insulin pump. But I have to pay about $2600 right now to get a new one. Cant afford that. Hoping my current pump doesnt die. I will re-check in September and hope I have reached my limit.

I really dont know that much about my plan. I am willfully ignorant. But it confuses the crap out of me.

$300/month is 10% of my income. Before taxes. It's about 15% or more of my take home.

Does that sound like a good amount to pay for health care to you?

Keep in mind, too, this is the cheapest that is available to me.

Some other sites indicate I might get more of a tax break (around $50), but there is so much contradictory info out there, I have no idea which is legit.

Dola, this is just me too. No dependents, no spouse, no serious health issues, 44 years old.

I mean, I don't know. People where I work (large university) pay the same whether they are a Dean or a janitor, there are no individual plans since that would defeat the purpose. I just don't really know what people expect, and the devil is always in the details (co-pays, deductibles, etc). I actually don't think 10% of your income is bad to cover your healthcare provided it actually covers things.

It doesn't cover things. As it is a cheaper plan, the deductible is ridiculously high. You are extremely limited in your choice of medical professionals you may go to. Considering I have to have insurance, thanks to the government's uber awesome healthcare system, I basically pay 15% of my take home to receive nothing, unless I have a catastrophic health event. That and paid for preventative care visits (once per year) is all I got for the $3600 I would shell out, which is a severe cost considering I already live in an area with cost of living so high.

I pay $300 semi-monthly for my plan -- and that's with a $750 work contribution. Granted, this is for a family of four and includes medical/dental.

We typically don't have many large items, but do have smaller stuff (I mean, kids). But my wife's recent kidney stone surgery? Glad we had it for that.

So, one of the reasons a good number of economists favor eliminating the corporate tax break for health care is because most people don't really know the exact cost of their health care coverage, due to the fact that the employer tends to pay quite a lot for it. For example, I pay (roughly, because we get paid biweekly as opposed to semi-monthly) $136 a month for health insurance, but the Department pays $400 a month. So the total cost of my insurance is actually $536, but it is "hidden". And there are other employers who are far more generous than that (usually the big multinational corporations).

You realize this is kind of the definition of insurance, right?

This. After having a year of various surgeries/treatments for my wife for cancer, my yearly maximum on my plan for the family was $7,000 + 10% above that point. I'm sure billing would have been different if I didn't have insurance, but I think we paid around $15,000 total when the bill was low six figures if I didn't have it.

I think that Obamacare is a mess, but the function of catastrophic coverage is still there and still does work for the most part.

Right, that $3600 more than works if something happens. Which at 44 is much more likely than at 25. But you are healthy which is why it is low. That is the definition of insurance.

The healthcare.gov site is still a disaster and it's infuriating watching moron politicians who backed this dumb system keep telling people to use that site.

Define catastrophic.

I'm with CR on this one. The cheapest ACA plan in North Carolina is $409/mo. It doesn't cover anything except a physical - not primary care visits, not prescriptions, certainly nothing at an ER or Urgent Care Clinic, until I've met a $7150 deductible.


Who exactly does this plan benefit? I went to the ER last year with what turned out to be a kidney stone (thought it was appendix). Between the very brief ER stay and tests, the hospital claims were $6000. Under this cheapest of plans, I'd pay the full bill and still have to go to urgent care 4 more times before I'd meet my deductible and get any coverage at all.


I can afford better, so if I were to stay in North Carolina, I'd pay the $600/mo for actual coverage, with copays and a deductible that makes sense ($1500) if I end up in the hospital. Someone like my sister who makes under $40,000/yr is paying, as CR said, about 15% of her take home pay for coverage that does NOTHING until surgery is needed, or multiple ER visits.


NC does appear to be one of the worst states in the US for this. I think I mentioned up above a number of posts ago, in a state like Indiana I can pay $300/mo and get coverage that would cost me ~$500/mo here or more.

$3600 is what I pay just to have coverage. It doesn't count the $5000 deductible I would have to pay first before insurance pays anything.

So my "catastrophic cost" is over $8000. Obviously, if I have a catastrophic event, I will be happy to have it. But what if (far more likely), I have a non-catastrophic event that fails to reach my deductible? That is all out of pocket.

For instance, this year I developed sciatica and had to go to PT. Each session cost me $50, and they wanted me to go more than once a week (I shut that down and went just once per week). If this happened under this plan, I am paying $200/month just for the PT (4 sessions per month) in addition to the health insurance premium.

What am I paying for? I am paying for health insurance. Health insurance that doesn't cover anything until I am in the poor house. So really it's covering nothing.

This is a fair point. And I think there are legitimate criticisms that certain plans are too expensive or don't offer coverage at levels that make sense for self or small business employed or part time workers. I have a really good plan through my employer and still blanche sometimes at the deductible amounts.

But I do think there has to be a realization that paying for health insurance doesn't automatically make your health care free. That's the point I was trying to make. Insurance is just that--insurance. Protection against something out of the ordinary course. Or catastrophic. At some point, maybe it's semantics?

Except that now we're required to have it, no matter the cost or the benefit to us. And it doesn't do anything for you outside of one doctor's visit per year, short of that catastrophe, but we all need basic health care throughout the year.

I don't expect health care to be free at all. But if you're going to make it mandatory, you better damn well be helping out enough so that people can afford it.

Personally, I think the government should be stepping in for the corporate employer in health care for part time workers, the self-employed and small business owners/workers. I don't expect the same premiums I got when I worked at my title industry job, but in the ballpark would be nice.

If the government has decided we all need to have required healthcare, they should set up the program that helps the people first, not the health insurance companies first.

Sounds like something a public option would help take care of....

Alas, the people don't have lobbyists like health insurance companies do.

The best you can do is get really healthy so that you can avoid as much contact with the health industry as possible and get the lowest expenses possible for you age/sex/race/whatever.

Yeah, definitely this is true. Practically speaking though, the current state of the "bronze tier" plans is just a huge mess. Given how little they actually cover, they should be extremely inexpensive. If you want a $10 copay to see the doctor and lower deductibles, sure, pay for that as a luxury.


Because I'm moving out of the state soon (with healthcare costs compared to other states as the last straw that actually made the decision for me), I decided not to renew my BCBSNC coverage for 2017. I've signed up for a short term plan at a rate of $72/mo that covers nothing up to a $10k deductible and then provides pretty darn good coverage if I end up in the hospital. Its legit catastrophic coverage. It's not an ACA approved plan, so I'm subject to penalties if I don't finish my move and get approved coverage in my new state in 2 months. That's what the bronze tier plans should be IMO.

I have some pro Diamond Joe bias in me, well a lot of pro Diamond Joe bias if I'm honest, but regardless of your stripes, I think this is pretty cool.

This, IMO, is an ENORMOUS point that's gotten almost completely lost in the discussion.

I've mentioned before about how I'm literally bewildered how (or even when) insurance went from being something used for major situation rather than being every time someone sneezes.

In the long run it's cheaper to pay for routine checkups rather than waiting for major illnesses. Insurance became routine because insurance companies did the math.

And it created an absurd entitlement mentality that is a pox upon the nation.

Right about the time a normal office visit went from being able to be paid out of pocket to needing insurance to avoid a a bill in the hundreds for a simple visit.

I'm seeing it with vet bills now. Pushing more medical insurance for pets, and the cost of each visit going up substantially.

I get that you're a Social Darwinist and as long as you're willing to live in a cut throat, all against all, kind of society, that would be valid cultural opinion that would be worthwhile, but this country was never that.

So insurance companies should pay more just so you feel like people are getting the proper amount of suffering?

It's more along the lines that the have's and have not's exist for a reason and that if you're member of the have's you are in a position to have something that helps you. Have not's would hence need to work to attain that, and that would provide motivation for them to add to society to improve their lot, but that by providing that service, it's a dis-incentive for them and they can no longer be productive members of society, and therefore haven't earned their lot, unlike the have's which have.

As in, that's what Jon would say.

But the initial question was about why insurance covers preventive care. They do because it's better for the bottom line. This isn't charity, it's capitalism.

I want to know why Insurance costs more and has worse coverage?

What kind of business model would survive that except health insurance?

Is it because it has become an entitlement like Jon says?

Or are they just squeezing every last cent out of our pockets?

While the insurance companies are the ones clearly charging more, they are charging more for a reason. Health care facilities are charging more because they are enabled by the current insurance system. I have a ton of doctors and nurses in my family (I'm the black sheep). Everyone in the game knows how it works. You have to make a drastic change in both industries to make real change.

Yeah, add in that the more expensive insurance becomes the more people don't have it, and the more people don't have it the more people can't or won't pay for healthcare visits, and the more people who don't pay the more healthcare providers are incentivized to raise the prices for the insurance companies and people who do, you have a real shit sandwich of a vicious cycle.

The only way to get around that to my tiny mind is to have some form of single payer or government intervention to force everyone to keep prices low, but you can't suggest that without being accused of being unamerican and a socialist, so what next?

One of the last times I'll be able to bring up this thread.

Obama to Free Manning, Jailed for a Vast Leak of U.S. Secrets

Definitely not a fan of commuting the sentence of traitors.

We need more Mannings and Snowdens. Telling the truth about evil, illegal activity should never be a crime.

Manning dumped a lot of information w/o scrutinizing it. In his mind it was petty revenge.

And who knows what was going through Snowden's mind. I'm not sure of his real intentions.

Well, I suppose you're right. It's not a crime, but what he did was.

I'm a little torn about the whole thing, especially with my line of work (InfoSec). I don't believe Manning's motivation was anything more noble than revenge, and it put people's lives in real danger. More than anything though I think it showed an embarrassing lack of security controls in place when I consider what my organisation was doing to protect our (comparatively almost insignificant) data even back in 2010.

Obama is determined to give Carter a run for his money right to the wire I guess.

Manning ought to have been shot. And Obie isn't really much better at this point, this might be as vile an act as he's committed.

And this probably ought to be the catalyst for an end to executive clemency.

He would've been better off hacking in than infiltrating the ranks and being a dispicable turn coat. He deserves to die, not be pardoned by our President.

He wasn't pardoned.

Shh, just let the outrage flow.

Nope, but she will be released from prison in May and will not have to serve anymore time.

There is zero way Manning should have been released. I'm not as outraged as many are, but I think it sets an incredibly horrific tone. Of course, I'm one of the right wing nut jobs that doesn't think Snowden is a hero at all, so I'm probably not the right one to talk about.

I expect Obama will have more controversial commutes and pardons in his last few days. I highly doubt anything will be worse than this one.

I don't agree with his decision.

Not sure I agree with the commutation but the sentence seemed somewhat absurd. The government wasn't able to prove the most serious charges. Manning basically got over-sentenced for stealing sports memorabilia when Snowden had committed a brutal double homicide.

Thanks for the he/she correction. Sincerely.

I think it is fair to criticize the commutation, but we should be talking about what actually happened rather than frothing about what didn't.

Well...Good morning, sunshine! :)

Bottom line. Obama having her sentence commuted was a terrible decision for any President to make. We need to rethink this executive power. Could you imagine if Obama had started this behind closed doors by saying "We should pardon him?" Makes you wonder if if he's qualified to make sound legal decisions like that.

So, on the one hand you're arguing that we should all be rational and give Trump a chance and on the other you're playing the "could you imagine game?" Sounds just like a MSM talking head!

Trump vs the MSM. That's an excellent topic too. :)