Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Importance of Health Insurance

Now is the time of year when most employers have benefits enrollment. If you ever considered not getting insurance, don't. If you don't have the option of getting employer based insurance, I would suggest finding an individual plan. If you can't afford a full plan, I would strongly suggest just getting an insurance plan for cancer/heart attack/stroke.

I have always enrolled in insurance and for so many years paid into it more than I got out. As many of you know, this year we needed the insurance. Our billed medical expenses this year were over $157k. The insurance plan negotiated this value down to about $92k. We still ended up paying almost $7k, but could you imagine if we didn't have insurance? I am not writing this for sympathy, but I want this to be an example to the people I know who don't have insurance.

Two points I want to make; first - hospitals jack up the payment for the services and the insurance companies put a cap on the service rate, second - from my example, the insurance company pays a great deal of the cost.

Even with this, I am not advocating socialized medicine, even if I had to pay double for my insurance. My experience of living in the UK for 6 months showed me socialized medicine is only good if you are always healthy.

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