Health Insurance Rant

I meant it this way:
The porsche is something you haggle over (however each of us thinks it should be).
The milk: Not something you haggle over. They tell you the price. You then decide whether you want to buy it.

Out of those two things, the insurance is more like the milk (what I was trying to say; sorry if I wasn't making sense). I am not going to get a call and haggle over the premium. He or she is going to say, "This is the premium," and I am going to decide whether I want to buy their insurance.

It's a frustrating and senseless business practice to me. ... to make me wait for someone to call me back on their schedule when I just want to know the premium. The person I had on the phone should have just given me that info.

 

I am not buying a plan from the Obamacare exchange. ... They don't need my income (it has nothing to do with the premium on their plan -- just as when I get my home owners insurance, they don't need my income), and I am not getting a subsidy or tax credits, etc. The plan I was calling about is sold off exchange -- there are no subsidies available for it. It's sold directly by them. Honestly, it is simply an insurance company that has processes that made something that should be easy, frustrating for me.

 

I am totally with you. Unfortunately, my options are very limited compared to what I used to have to choose from. Even my current company has been a nightmare to get answers from (not on how much the premium is), but other things in the year I have been with them -- and that is from someone who didn't have very many claims, so who knows what they are like if you actually needed medical care? I may not go with the company I am trying to get a premium from; right now I am trying to figure out my options. Trust me, if all things are equal, this experience has turned me off of them.

But unfortunately, they all suck. There are shitty plans that keep the premiums down, among other ways by having crappy networks that don't include the good hospitals in New York and have a crummy network of doctors. Then there are a bunch of plans that are affiliated with some of the good hospitals, but in order to keep the premiums from being completely unaffordable, hey offer a doctor network that is scaled down from the kinds of networks I used to get with my insurance -- so you get somewhat limited doctor options when you are looking for recommended specialists. Then, there are a few plans (like where my current company is trying to steer me toward) that have a slightly better network (but still subpar compared to what I had 5 or 6 years ago), but will hit me with premiums that are a more than 50 percent increase over this year (and well more than 100 percent over what I was paying a few years ago).

I am basically trying to balance competing things. I want the insurance for the big things -- for my chemo if I get cancer or for my thoracic surgery when someone on here goes all Rand Paul's neighbor on me. And I want a plan that has at least 2 of the top 4 hospitals in Manhattan. I won't get a plan with a completely shit network of doctors, but I will settle for a slightly scaled back network of doctors over the super expensive plans I am looking at to save on the premiums. My thinking is I will pay out of pocket for good specialists (second opinions) if it is something big. But I want the insurance to cover the hospitalization and the more expensive stuff if it comes to anything catastrophic or medically serious.

 

Ms. Ragu grew up with the metric system. Every time she throws something at me in kilometers or grams or gives me the temperature in celsius, I yell at her and demand that she speak English.