Insurance versus Care

Health insurance is not health care. Health insurance is a bet between you and an insurance company that you are sicker than they think you are. You can’t possibly win that bet. Either they are going to suck large amounts of money out of you for services never rendered or you are going to suffer the torments of injury or disease for the slim satisfaction of getting some of your money back.

My wife and I are paying for health insurance, so now we can only afford to be seriously ill. Even then we’ll have to meet a steep deductible first.

In my experience, medical savings accounts are useless to people who might need to take a high deductible policy to keep premiums down. We can hardly find the money for any savings after paying our living expenses and premiums, let alone special savings earmarked for medical expenses. When I did have a medical savings account, if the money was deducted from it to pay its own annual fee, that did not count as a legitimate expenditure, so I paid a tax penalty on it.

I did not bother with health insurance for a number of years, because the premiums made no sense. I put the money directly into savings. If I got sick, it was there. If I didn’t get sick, it was still there. That made sense to me. If I needed to go to the doctor, I went and I paid for the office visit.

Certainly if I had a serious problem I was in trouble. Legends abound of patients without insurance left to stiffen on gurneys in hospital hallways. In fact, the insurance agent who finally scored with me told me that the hospital could take my house if I came to them uninsured. Not only would I go down, but my wife would be left homeless.

Marriage does not define my relationship with my wife. We cohabitated devotedly. Marriage is simply convenient one-stop shopping to have a couple’s bond legally recognized. I suppose we could have written up a contract that provided a similar level of legal protection, but we would basically have been reinventing marriage. Our personal bond is for while we live. Marriage is for the survivor, really.

So I forked over. Now, with Christmas barreling down on us, a big, honkin’ quarterly payment is due, at the same time as a mortgage payment and a property tax bill. Ho f–king ho ho ho. And I haven’t been to a doctor since my ill-advised checkup shortly before we got approved for this so-called health plan six months ago. The results of that little foray, hardly life-threatening in themselves, earned me an automatically higher premium and the exclusion of the complaint in question.

Health insurance is not health care. It is just another reminder that people who don’t meet a certain financial threshold are disposable. But let’s not change a thing. Let the market rule.