Freedom: Guns versus Health Care

One is a product with an easily anticipated cost at predictable intervals. The other is a service with an unpredictable cost from nothing to millions of dollars over the course of a lifetime. The demand for healthcare, when the need arises, is also absolute given people are generally willing to pay anything to continue living, and so it breaks the usual laws of supply and demand. And when your health is compromised, it's hard or impossible to simply work more to pay for it, and when your health is compromised, all other rights and privileges are in jeopardy. If you get cancer when you're retired with good benefits, you will have less to worry about than if you're a self-employed mother without benefits.... Versus this rambo fantasy of using your glock to stop gub'mint tyranny or the highly unlikely scenario of using it to defend, rather than kill, yourself. Yeah... pretty different. The free market does a far better job with one than the other.

 

Thanks for the clarification - I hadn't read the timeline closely enough of your coverage situation in relation to when you had your accident or came down with your illness, whatever it was, it sounds pretty miserable. A friend of mine at work fell off a ladder at home and broke his back. He was able to actually come back to work almost immediately, but he was wearing a serious brace. I think he was doing something as trivial as cleaning his gutters.

I think your situation to some extent is actually an example of my point about how healthcare in the US impacts our freedom. It played such a role in your life that together with your wife you decided what company she should work for based on a lower salary but better health insurance.

What do you think? I mean you and I can carry on and talk about this other stuff and it's great. It's what makes this place worth my time.

Now, I don't want you to come back and accuse me of setting you up, without me first letting you know that's exactly of course what I'm doing.

But, let's just say that I phrased the OP so that it was far less dramatic, something like,

"Do your considerations of health insurance coverage play a role in determining to continue to work for your current employer or in your choices available when selecting new employment opportunities?"

Now, if that had been the question then you've answered it affirmatively.

***
I feel for you brother, in spite of the fact that you referred to your briefs as your panties. Hey, as the great Chuck Berry said, live how you want to live baby.

Rewind when you carried your own insurance and it was pre-ACA which was enacted in 2010 and I guess took effect in 2011.
Let's just say for a decade you covered it yourself from 1999 to 2009.
This is the coverage I'm asking about.
How much were your premiums?
How much were your deductibles?
How much were your copays?
How much was your max out of pocket, if there even was one?
Who was your carrier?
I mean just even ballpark a guess for me?
Hell, please prove me wrong in this thread: I would love it!
I'm convinced this is a huge problem, but not so much for myself.
I don't really give a **** about my life, easy come, easy go is my motto.
Stole it from a high school poem actually.
Uh, except for stuff I give a **** about, and then I can be difficult to work with.

***
I worked for Jacobs Engineering from March 2007 to September 2019.
It was a big bounce for me from my previous employer, Mustang Engineering, now known as Wood Dot, The Scotts fell to some stoopid marketing on that name change.
Had to swap out the jeans for slacks and always with the Land's End button down Oxfords, meh....
I digress, it was a cool gig and I learned a lot about Shell and Exxon and how they execute projects with EPCs.
I learned about some other companies a bit along the way too, but not nearly as much.
Southern Company, BP, the doomed Limetree JV on my old stomping ground down at STX.
Finally came Chevron, the most misfit bunch of client engineers ever shuffled off to the land of misfit toys.
Nope, not interested.
Didn't show up for work and couldn't have cared less....
Finally they canned me for it.
Miraculously, it still seems to me, I survived and my wife has as well, in spite of no work and no insurance for two years.
No unemployment and no sweet checks from Uncle Sam even though, like you and everyone else, I've paid into the system my whole life since I was about 16.
I could also derail my own thread at this point and switch to write about STEM and the lack of Federal oversight of offshoring policies will cause, but I'll let that rest for the moment.

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Rugged individualism, but you're hiring a lawyer to get that sweet cash from the collective? Dude....

 

I'm not lazy about reading stuff here bro. Help me out and link me to the post I missed where you specifically mentioned price controls in this thread.

You wanna take that tack then I'm open to debating it and you can make your point about how an actual free market healthcare system would work. I only stipulate that all insurance and group funding has to go for it to function according to Adam Smith principles. As it is now, fraud is problematic and cost transparency is non-existent. And that's just the beginning. Biotech is likely sufficiently advanced that a deadly disease could be manufactured along with its cure and then that could be marketed for what the market would bear. That's the limit to your argument about free market health care from my point of view. I prefer a solution far away from that limit, how about you?

 

Gee, I guess I should be sad that @DentalFloss and @fmw didn't want to talk to me anymore, hahaha, ppppffffffffffftttt....

Lose the plot and then just slink off without conceding anything. Typical PF response.....

 

Get over yourself, and don't mistake me missing an alert for conceding any point by silence. Even were I inclined to concede a point, and it has happened many times, I would say so.

Perhaps you misunderstood. When we made the decision on which job opportunity for her to take, it was based on "prior proper planning", not because my condition existed. She took the job in roughly 2011, and at the time the idea of needing such an insurance policy was laughable, but as a former boy scout, plus having more than two brain cells to rub together, I believe in the idea of being prepared, so that's what we did. It's the same reason we bought a relatively inexpensive fixer-upper as opposed to mortgaging a large "impress the neighbors" house. Though it's not like we live in a shack, it's just smaller and older. And built like a brick-shithouse, because apparently it's true- they don't make 'em like they used to. Once again, for the exact same reason, we have chosen to insure our home, despite the fact that having no mortgage left us in a situation where doing so is completely optional.

ALL of those choices were in the name of self-dependence, preparedness, and a trait that used to be standard in the US, self-reliance.

We also have backyard chickens, and a modest garden, though that is a recent project of my better half that is just now beginning to bear fruit, literally in this case. And nothing beats homegrown herbs and spices to liven up a piece of deceased cow!

Minus a few years from that, but pretty close. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of good answers for the rest of your questions other than to say it cost me $400-something/month, covered only me, my now-ex got her coverage from her employer, and it was "real" insurance. Reasonable deductibles, reasonable out of pocket, and good coverage in the event of disaster. At least 80%, and I want to say more, with like a $5,000 deductible. I didn't use it much an ER visit or two, same with Urgent Clinic uses, but I don't remember ever spending even $100 out of pocket. While I'm sure a million dollar stay after emergency surgery would have cost me more than the $200 it did in 2017 (or 2018, depending on how you want to count), I think it would have been limited to my $5k deductible.

And finally we come to the actual point of this entire thread...

You got too big for your britches, thought your sh*t didn't stink, and above all else... FAILED TO PROPERLY PLAN

Well, your failure to properly plan in a timely matter does not make your problems an emergency for me. Or anyone else. Like I said previously, it's your responsibility to take care of yourself after your parents are through with you, and you didn't do that. Or, perhaps you did, as you said you've managed to "survive", however you define that, for the past two years, but you haven't said what you're cooking up for the next two years. But that is your problem. My advice would be to get a job, but your actions may have all but blacklisted you from whatever it is you did before, which did sound lucrative.

You have misinterpreted me. All I am trying to do is collect on an insurance claim, for insurance that I paid into for decades, and likely will never even get my principal back, even after I start collecting regular old social insecurity. It's a shame, though, that all that money wasn't actually invested into an account that I actually owned, even if I was only allowed to access it once reaching a certain age or when situations like what happened to me happened.

It would be worth far more than I'll ever collect, and given my physical situation, even though except for my disability I feel quite healthy and full of vitality at 53, I have no confidence I'll live long enough to get one thin dime.

But that's what government does to productive people... destroys them.

 

You can dodge around the situation you find yourself in all you want, but it is an explicit admission of how the way health care works in the US that you and your wife's decision of whom to work for was personally influenced by it. Yes, it was planning ahead, absolutely. In no way does that negate the fact that the framework such as it is required you and your wife to select her job because of it.

 

So what?

Yeah, we had to plan ahead for many things, possible healthcare expenses being only one item on the list. But we had to plan ahead for OUR lives, not yours or anyone else's. Or that's how things should be, at any rate. It is sadly not how they are.

 

Aside from as I pointed out earlier your choice to describe your briefs as your panties, you've left some pretty spectacular openings were I to decide to take offense from several of your comments and turn this into a right proper vintage flame fest. Unfortunately, as much as I would enjoy the repartee, PF mods are not into it so I'll abstain from retaliating in kind to what have been the fairly low key shade you've thrown my way in this discussion.

Unlike you and some others that post here, I have no desire generally to impugn anyone's character or life choices when I post here.

You have no idea who I am, what I've lived through in my life and what freedom means to me.
I've planned ahead with my money and will never be in a position where I will give a flying f whether I get a check from the US treasury.
I could care less that I make too much money year over year to ever step foot into a VA facility and milk my four years of service for a free pair of eyeglasses or eventual treatment for whatever ailment eventually befalls me.

I didn't get here on my own to where I am today.
My dad was a big help to me by letting me live in his house for free while I was going to college.
But, I could have made it work otherwise if he'd asked me to find my own place rather than complain to me a couple of years after the fact that I had hugely inconvenienced his lifestyle by doing so.
Funny how at the time he never mentioned anything about it.
I had plenty of resources available for roommates and it absolutely wouldn't have been a problem.
And those roommates would instead have the credit for helping me out.
It took me seven years to finish a five year program and I have no regrets about it.
I spent those extra two years learning to code and it has been a big help in my career giving me an edge over or equal to anyone I've ever worked with in the field of petrochemical process control.
But this coding edge that I mention is only with respect to a very few limited tasks that are only one small part of my job requirements.
Overall, I'm probably not much more than a solid B player, with an occasional C and A here or there.
I'm may be a little above average on an IQ test, but if I can do something then I generally expect that anybody else can do it too.

There are only a very few things that could potentially interfere with my plan and I would expect that the most likely event would be a car accident.
Is that what happened to you?

Government destroys productive people?
Yeah, look what it's done to Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jimmy Buffet, Charles Koch, etc....
Give me a break. You've seemingly been mostly successful in life, what productive people has government destroyed?

What imaginary world you seem to be dreaming of I have no idea.
You mentioned earlier your selective blinders toward the interconnected reality of the world we live in.
Food and water is vastly interconnected.
Electricity is vastly interconnected.
Communication and information is vastly interconnected.
Our roads and bridges are vastly interconnected and haven't been properly maintained for decades.

Here's a bit of fun for maybe someone besides you that for whatever reason might possibly read this post,
with a nod toward Lloyd Bentsen, a Texas D Senator that many of our right honorable R leaning PF members will likely have a bit of respect for.
Heck, even some of the particularly obstinate team Trump members here might have some respect for Lloyd Bentsen if they would be honest and forthright for once in one of their posts.
And yes, I am saying that we do have members here that are distinctly less than forthright and candid with posts.
You seem to simply be lacking in the age old advice from Socrates to know thyself, based on where you're at and what you're arguing in completely inapplicable and purely theoretical favor of.

I knew Jeremiah Johnson, I fought alongside Jeremiah Johnson, and I was friends with Jeremiah Johnson, and you Sir, are no Jeremiah Johnson, hahaha....


Unfortunately, in spite of your humorous avatar, I anticipate that you will not find this funny at all and that's just a damn shame.

As our health care system works now, it is from a purely accounting standpoint nothing but a hot mess.
Copays, deductibles, maximum out-of-pocket expenses.
A single Advil charged at $10.
Your lux $27k wheelchair that you seemed to admit was ridiculous but then argued was completely legit.

Like I wrote, I am pleased that you have received healthcare benefits that have made your life bearable given a health problem that I myself might prefer death to and I absolutely applaud your ability to carry on. And it would be exceedingly low of me to make comments that would far and away exceed the bit of shade you've tossed at me, so I'm skipping it in spite of the little bastard group of synapses upstairs here that are rallying to have me do it.

Do you really have no appreciation of how luck played into the coverage you received versus folks that have been equally responsible in taking care of their own business but had just this one gap that they just couldn't justify a monthly payment to cover, if they could even find a policy that would cover catastrophic needs? For less than a fifth or a quarter of their net pay? Tough titties eh? Have a glass of wine?