I stole this one from a cousin. It’s a very valid point but it doesn’t go far enough. Sure you have that pesky deductible, I think mine is $14000, but what about the premium that is paid every month? Mine is approximately $1400 a month, or $16800 annually. Sure a portion of that is paid by the government, compliments of our taxes, but do you understand what that means?
It means I pay approximately $16000 a year for a service I can’t use until I spend another $14000. To put it another way, I have to spend about $10000 more than the poverty line for my state before I get to realize a discount on most medical services. To give you a comparison, that’s $8000 more than the median yearly income in Montana for a single person, just a few thousand shy of a median family income.
But wait, there’s more. You think an unused gym membership is a money sink? Consider an insurance company that just sits back and collects those premiums every month knowing that only a small percentage of deductibles will be met. That wasn’t by accident. That’s what all those lobbyists bought when they helped write the ACA, when they were there in front of Congress testifying how much this was going to cost their companies because they couldn’t afford to insure an extra 30 million low income people a year. Can you imagine how hard it must have been for them to keep a straight face? And they make sure to testify regularly about how expensive it is to keep doing so. They keep raising rates, just to prove how hard it is to stay profitable.
And apparently we believe them because we keep telling each other how we can’t afford to move to a different healthcare system.
Oh. Wait a minute. That’s not most of us saying it. That’s a particular set of Congress members and certain media outlets that keep repeating that mantra. Weird. I wonder who gave them that idea?
