Author:
muppet
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mark.warner@gmail.com
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Date:
1/20/2009 7:04:36 AM
Subject:
Re: Our health insurance blows.
OK since this is a topic with which I'm intimately familiar, I'll chime in.
I've got health insurance through Aetna where I work. I used to pay around $47/week for family coverage, which averaged to around $185/month because of months with an extra thursday in them. For that, I got 100% coverage after copays. Copays were $20 for regular doctor visits, $30 for specialists, and then $100 for ER, $300 for inpatient. Not too bad. However, the prescription coverage blew goats. I was paying $75/month for my Crohn's medication, $75/month for one of Onion's meds... until our monthly prescription total was something like $300+.
So, this year they started offering this Health Fund thing. I pay $15/week for family coverage. The plan covers the first $1000 of medical bills. For people who hardly ever get sick, this is basically free money. After the first $1000, there's a $2000 deductible that has to be met, then they cover EVERYTHING except prescriptions at 100%. Prescriptions are $15 for "preferred" generic brands, $30 for non-preferred generics, and $45 for non-preferred brand name drugs. This is WAY better than the $75 bullshit I was paying before but it comes with the caveat of the $2000 deductible. Oh yeah, and certain drugs are free like my asthma inhalers and my bone density medication usually taken by menopausal old ladies. That alone saves me $600-700/year.
To swallow up the deductible, I just opened up an FSA with $2500 in it. Now we just pay with our FSA card for all our medical stuff during the deductible period. When the deductible is up, we just switch from the FSA card to our insurance card again. All told, I'm paying about the same as I was paying for the crappy coverage but getting excellent coverage.
Of course, that'll change when the free prescription thing goes away, which I'm sure they were only using as bait to get us all on this high-deductible plan. The cost savings will be less for us, but still significant.
The moral is: you have to do some truly complicated, backwards shit to not get screwed on insurance. Also, you're getting a little bit screwed compared to the deal you would have gotten in say, 1998, and you could do a little better at a larger company, but all in all your rates aren't too bad for 2009 especially if your employer has less than 100 employees.
