Do you have health insurance

Of course. We didn't just jump into it. The alternative was $950 a month for a plan with a $5,000 individual deductible, so potentially $20,000 a year. We talked to friends who have been members for year, and they've delivered babies, had knees replaced and rehabbed from strokes without incident.

It's not like insurance has been any better for us. When Baby MMSW was born, our insurance company (via Gannett) decided it was under no obligation to pay most of our bill. Only the doctor was covered. The hospital wasn't, because all the rooms were private and the insurance would only pay for a semiprivate room. She had a very minor breathing thing they wanted to watch, so she needed neonatology and radiology in her first couple days. Turns out, radiology, neonatology and just about everything else was out of network, as was the anesthesiologist for my wife's C-section.

Our cost: $25,000. Between that and our young-and-stupid debt, our family started in a huge hole. Baby MMSW was probably 13 before we finally were able get rid of all our debt and start building some financial health.

 

It shows how far we've fallen that this can even be called "insurance" and is just blindly accepted as the price you gotta pay just in case you need that double lung transplant next week.

 

When my kids were born, the insurance (also through Gannett) tried the same thing about semi-private vs. private rooms. We got the hospital, which was in-network, to write us a letter saying they only had private rooms, which my wife forwarded to the insurance company, which paid the bill.

Some states now have surprise bill laws, in which if you're in an in-network hospital and an out-of-network doctor treats you, your insurance has to treat it like the out-of-network doctors are in-network. One problem though is that the patient has to notify the insurance. And another big problem is that there are certain types of plans that don't fall under state law.

 

This was all complicated by the fact that I’d left the company the month this insurance took effect. Anyone remember that in July 2000? I think chainwide, everyone got on the new plan.

But because I left that month, my paperwork got bungled somehow. So even though I was covered that month, the insurance company kept rejecting the claims. By the time it was sorted out, six months had past, and then it went from the hospital saying “you don’t have insurance” to “your insurance isn’t covering you; pay up,” and the time to negotiate seemed to have passed.

We paid rather than further damage our credit. I’m not sure it was the right call.

 

We are very lucky. My wife retired from UAB with enough years for full benefits, and has medical insurance for life through the state teacher's union. We pay under three hundred a month as our share for full medical coverage as a couple, including vision and dental. She's over 65 and has Medicare supplemental, and I'll hit 65 in a few months and will pick it up as well. Moreover that is also through the teacher's union, and I have yet to see any other similar Medicare coverage that covers as much as cheaply. It's a huge group with very shrewd people doing the negotiation.

She's got a lot of medical issues. I don't even want to think about the idea of not having medical insurance on her. I'm pretty stinking healthy although some age related stuff is creeping in (knock wood) but if she was not covered we'd be eaten alive by medical bills.