--Well now that the balance in congress has been tipped and everyone's been safely bought off, sure enough Blue Cross has raised my rates: 22% this time; total's now $23,000/yr. I need customers or a new line of work! I'd be curious to know if anyone's got group coverage thru AWS or any other industry group and what your experience has been with them..
I've had Kaiser for 30 years. I'm 58 years old and I pay $458/month. The copay is high, but we fund an HSA account for $1500 a year and that will cover all the copays for us plus eyeglasses.
Works out to $7000 a year, less than 1/3 what you're paying.
Like the carnival owner said "I mitted the shamus*, so Let'er rip....." [obscure American slang for bribing local law enforcement]
Only 22%!
Anthem Blue Cross has told some {est. 800k} customers it will raise their health insurance premiums as much as 39 percent beginning March 1.
Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).
What is that number as a percentage of reciepts?
Wes
Don't know if Blue Cross is the same as Blue Cross Blue Shield, but I was paying $9,930 for a family of 4 with a $2,500 deductible. Last year I decided to try something to reduce costs. I got a high deductible ($10,000) and a Health Savings Account. My premium went down to $4,320. I fund the HSA with the money I saved on the reduced premium ($5,610). I add a little to make it to the maximum contribution of $5,850 (2009). The contribution is tax deductible on federal income taxes. I opened my HSA in June 2009 and only used about $700 from the account so after putting in my 2010 contribution I'll have more than the $10,000 deductible in the HSA. At retirement the money can be rolled into an IRA.* I wish I would have started this when the plan was first passed by congress. Mike
Unfortunately, Kaiser isn't in all states, mostly the Western ones. I've had them going on 30 years myself, started out at $6 every 2 weeks for just myself. They're a nonprofit and have a lot of emphasis on prevention. No dental and no eyeglass benefits for the current program, think it's about $60 every two weeks, it's been getting jacked up, too. Recently got two Stellite hip joints and a bit of heart work done for $250 for each hospital visit. Figure that's a bargain, even if I paid about 30 years of premiums before collecting anything big. But that's what insurance is for. Don't know what's available in the rest of the country that's similar.
Stan
I know approximately where Steamer lives and Kaiser is there.
Too_Many_Tools wrote in news:0e0010db-c3f8-4720- snipped-for-privacy@l26g2000yqd.googlegroups.com:
Why should they?
Those "sheeple" are all Democrats and 0bama believers.
--Yes we have a Kaiser, about 10 miles from us. Only problem is I've heard some creepy stories notably from SWMBO who lost her dad due to a bad diagnosis at one Kaiser and lost her mom to another Kaiser mishap. Have serious 'quality control' qualms and would like to stick with the good doc we've come to trust.
--Yeah.. What we need are a few "scarlet letters": i.e. if someone would just identify the bean counters doing this, give 'em a name and address so to speak, I'll bet these things wouldn't happen nearly as often..
Ed, they're doing it because they can. As I've said many times, for individual policies, there is NO real competition in that business. It's a pure, or nearly pure, oligopoly.
For example, why haven't you just shopped around for another policy at a better price?
Well, for us it's one of those risk management issues. There's ways to work the Kaiser system and find and see a doctor you like. In any case, health care reform is going to look a lot more like Kaiser than Blue Cross...
--Yeah...
--Been there, done that many times; no joy..
That was sort of a leading question, which I didn't intend. The point is, you rarely find significantly different deals among the major health care insurers. It's not collusion; it's just that they all have the same interest, and therefore there is no real competition. It's in their mutual interest to offer roughly the same products, at approximately the same price. That's how oligopolies work.
====== In case you missed it.
TRENTON, N.J. ? Consumers in at least four states who buy their own health insurance are getting hit with premium increases of 15 percent or more ? and people in other states could see the same thing.
Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint Inc., has been under fire for a week from regulators and politicians for notifying some of its 800,000 individual policyholders in California that it plans to raise rates by up to 39 percent March 1.
The Anthem Blue Cross plan in Maine is asking for increases of about 23 percent this year for some individual policyholders. Last year, they raised rates up to 32 percent.
And in Oregon, multiple insurers were granted rate hikes of 15 percent or more this year after increases of around 25 percent last year for customers who purchase individual health insurance, rather than getting it through their employer.
"You're going to see rate increases of 20, 25, 30 percent" for individual health policies in the near term, Sandy Praeger, chairwoman of the health insurance and managed care committee for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, predicted Friday.
Most states don't have the legal authority to block or reduce health insurance rate increases, Praeger noted.
Under Anthem's proposal, a family of four could be charged up to $1,876 per month if the proposed rates are allowed to take effect in July. ============== {editorial comment -- gross US median family income is now about
50k$/year.Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).
They can't. But who cares? If we did something to put a lid on the insurance companies, that would be socialism. Can't have that.
So hang on. And remember, insurance companies make a *percentage* of their total take. Lower healthcare costs do almost nothing to improve their bottom line. In fact, it's just the opposite.
Call it the "Republican premium."
======== Indeed they cannot.
The problem is that people don't stop getting sick or injured just because they don't have health insurance.
Its the taxpayers [through governmental social services] and other medical consumers [who pay their bills] that subsidize these costs. These costs are greatly amplified and exacerbated because preventative care [e.g. immunizations and prenatal care] or early stage intervention was not available, and heroic/emergency care is then required when a crisis finally occurs.
It should be obvious that the U.S. already has universal medical care, including large numbers of undocumented immigrants. Unfortunately, much of this medical care is marginal and late, thus combining inefficiency / ineffectiveness with excessively high [hidden] costs.
Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).
Exactly.
Yes, we do. And, yes, it is. We're paying for universal disaster care. The idea of health care reform is to change it so we pay for better care -- which costs less, and which could cost a *lot* less if we acknowledged the fact that market incentives in health care are inherently perverse, and that we need to manage them. That's how the Europeans manage it for 1/3 less than we pay.
So are 7 year loans on automobiles that make it possible to pay for an overpriced Obama motors/UAW/GM car an "Democrat Premium"?
Seriously, at a certain point, you loose sales. An insuance company makes nothing if a company drops their group coverage. Due to how law is that people showing up at the e room must be treated and that cost is passed on to those that can pay, perhaps the insurance company looses money. My belief is while insurance companies like to make money, they also like to be able to find buyers for their product.
Wes
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