Have private health insurance? Happy with it? That’s probably because you haven’t had to use it.

Karen Pollitz, an insurance expert at Georgetown University, says the problem is actually even bigger: Most people who have insurance don’t realize that they might not have as much protection as they think. The reason most people say they’re satisfied with their health insurance? They don’t use it very much. “The majority of Americans who are healthy account for only about 3 percent of total medical spending,” Pollitz said. “It’s kind of like hearing that most people are satisfied with their new car before they drive it off the dealer’s lot.”

On the other hand, those who do run up big bills often experience problems. One survey, Pollitz said, “found…that more than one in five cancer patients who had health insurance the whole time they were in treatment, nonetheless, ended up using up all or most of their savings on medical bills.”

Most people who go bankrupt due to medical expenses—80%—have health insurance. Health insurers in the U.S. routinely deny claims. Insurance companies drop people—they “retroactively cancel” the policies of people who’ve paid into the system for years—the moment they get sick and need coverage. People who have private health insurance are no more secure than people who have no insurance at all. We complain about the scaremongers on the right but what we really need are some effective scaremongers on the left. And our scaremongering should be easier: we don’t have to make shit up about “death panels” and pulling the plug on granny. All we have to do is tell the terrifying truth.

28 replies on “Where Are Our Scaremongers?”

  1. I say we stock up on swine flu vaccine in cities on the east and west coast. Seattle, LA, SF, Portland, NYC, Boston, Philly, Baltimore, D.C.. Tell people it’s to be taken “on the orders of the president”.

    Then release plague rats in places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Georgia.

    That oughta be a nice scare.

  2. Might I recommend two Frontline installments? One, “Sick Around America,” gives several examples of how the current system has failed (and even killed) good, honest, hardworking people. It brought tears to my eyes to think that here – in the richest country in the world – such things can happen to its people.

    “Sick Around the World” explores how other countries have successfully dealt with the issue.

    Both documentaries are available for viewing at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/….

  3. You can’t fucking convice these people. I have tried, day after day, to explain these facts to my dad. It will not work. He seems to think that magically his insurance is better than if we just had universal coverage. He refuses to believe that Europe is a great place to live, depsite visiting me while I lived there.

    He really thinks that we have more “freedom” here than other places, whatever that means. He also seems to think that our healthcare is better, depsite every fucking single thing saying that it is not. He won’t listen, and he has a college degree. He is not a stupid man. After dealing with him, I now understand it is a lost fucking cause on all other American’s with this world-view. I don’t know what to do.

  6. It just doesn’t work @5. These people have fixed this notion of “WE’RE #! FUCK YEAH!” so hard into their psyches that you could bury them under a mountain of facts to the contrary and it still wouldn’t change their minds.

  7. @Baconcat: he just says that everything costs money, and nothing is free. Therefore even if we pay a lot now, we’d pay even more if we had to cover all those uninsured people, and his taxes would go up, and there would be massive waiting lines for a doctor, and the system would go bankrupt, etc.

  8. So why haven’t the Dems gone after the industry? It seems an obvious tactic and one that could work because so many people have had bad experiences. Could it be that the Dems are just as much in the pocket of the insurance industry lobby as the R’s?

  10. After the war, after the torture, after the 2004 election, after Katrina, my mother said to me, “At least we’re still in the greatest country in the world.” And I said, “What if we’re not?” And she just looked at me as if it had never occurred to her.

    We could be in the greatest country in the world, but we’re fucking it up.

    FIRED UP!

  11. You can get a health insurance policy for $136 a month in Washington State.

    Poor people can get it for $33 a month.

    We already have “universal coverage” essentially.

    As far as cancer victims getting their life savings taken — Dennis Leary is still right — there is no cure for cancer.

    So when we say health care, what do we really mean…it seems to exist at two extremes. Types of health care:

    1) Flu shots, check ups. Well, private industry is already delivering that at no cost and for people with no insurance. Newsweek ran an article showing that in-store health clinics at Wal*Mart and elsewhere do a better job than standard medical practices at the basics.

    2) Broken bones, medium injuries. This is the type of stuff that most health care plans will easily cover and keep you from bankruptcy. And face it — we don’t really have cures for that stuff either…we x-ray it, straighten it up and put it in a cast –same as 100 years ago.

    3) The terrible stuff. Kidney transplanets, cancer, heart attacks. What can you say. Health insurance does not make you healthy. We have at present no real “treatment” for any of this stuff. At best, we can prolong life up to 5 years…typically its more like 18 months. Does life savings really matter to anyone other than the inheritors at that point?

    So I’m not really sure what is being argued about in a world seen with the lens of reality…

  12. 1
    I say we keep dickering around on the AIDS vaccine and shortly the hip coastal cities will have butt fucked themselves off the map.

  13. @11, Your “reality lens” is warped. If you’re talking about Washington Basic, you should know that there is a crazy long waiting list, exacerbated by the recession and high unemployment numbers. So, no, you really can’t get health insurance for $136/mo. if you don’t have it already.

    And who provides services at no cost, other than the county public health department? It certainly isn’t Walmart or any other for-profit company. Not that I would expect anyone not to make a buck for making me better–on the other hand, those making money off of denying me coverage for services that I have paid for should get birdshot in the face and denied reconstructive surgery.

  15. @14) And what happens if you already have a pre-existing condition? What if you’re not healthy?

    You really can’t defend their current practices. It’s great that young 24 year old kids with little to no health problems (and at the same time little cash) can get insurance for cheap.

    The same game doesn’t work for the elderly or the sick, even the young and sick.

  16. @14, I know how to work the internetz, thanks. That’s how I got my plan anyway–and you cannot get insurance for around $100/mo. unless it is extremely limited or catastrophic coverage (ooooh, thanks, you’ll cover 50% of an in-network hospital stay up to $25K, after I’ve met a $5K deductible! I can breathe easy there!). There is no coverage for flu shots or physicals or prescriptions or annual exams/birth control in those plans.

    Also, if you have a pre-existing condition, you will be denied enrollment–meaning that you can only get insurance through Washington Basic, IF they have room for you, or through an employer, IF they offer insurance plans–and even then, you won’t be covered by an employer plan at all for pre-existing conditions for several months or a year.

  17. People who buy insurance out of pocket know the reality, and everyone else who has employer health insurance should strike up a conversation with people who buy out of pocket (e.g. the self-employed, the unemployed, employees without employer plans, etc.):

    1. You pay $300-$400 a month per adult, $150 to $200 a month per child. *No dental coverage,* **no optical coverage,* *no preventative care coverage.* For a family of three, that’s $9000 a year just to *have* insurance.

    (Basic Health, as has been pointed out, has 20,000 people on a waiting list to get it.)

    (Also, because businesses get special rates, the policy paid per person is usually about half than people who buy out of pocket pay, so part of the problem with the system is that low prices are available only to people working for large employers.)

    2. You typically have a $500 to $1000 deductible, and after that you pay 20% up to $4000 to $600 per year. So, that means if you make any use of your health insurance in a calendar year, your annual out-of-pocket total can be around $22,000–assuming that your insurance doesn’t reject any of your claims, or drops you.

    Do you seriously have $22,000 lying around so that you can get sick without having to worry?

    3. You have a lifetime limit of $2 million in coverage. Think that sounds like plenty? Let me ask you again after you get cancer or need major long-term health care after a car hits you while you’re on your bike or something. It goes fast.

    (Incidentally, cancer *is* curable. Transplants *do* give people full-length life expectancies, and injuries from car accidents *are* fully recoverable.)

    4. Used up your $2 million? You can’t get more insurance. Period. You have to figure out how to get Medicaid, usually after declaring bankruptcy and probably losing your home and any other assets you had.

    In many ways, with our current system if you get seriously sick, you’re better off renting a small apartment and divorcing your spouse so that you quality for Medicaid before your sickness casts your family into financial ruin.

  19. One of the things nobody in the medical community will tell you is that people basically divide into two groups – one group are people who are health, and other than some low-dose aspirin and vitamins very rarely need care – and the other group get sick a lot.

    Single payer national health care is the only sane option.

  21. It’s not the prospect of Death Panels that worries these people. It’s the prospect of government-run Death Panels. They’re fine with a big faceless bureaucracy killing grandma by denying her care; They just feel that the big faceless bureaucracy that does this is entitled to make a profit from her death. Otherwise it’s Communism.

  22. After hearing this drumbeat of stupidity from the right, you would think rational American’s would be begging the president for the public option. And granny is goddamned stupid.

  23. Our health care system is like the abusive boyfriend that we’re afraid to leave, and so we make all these excuses about how the insurance companies “don’t really mean it when they hurt us.”

  25. Also, because businesses get special rates, the policy paid per person is usually about half than people who buy out of pocket pay, so part of the problem with the system is that low prices are available only to people working for large employers.

    Not quite. My company pays $5,000/year for my health insurance; I pay $1,800. That’s the main reason why individual policies are so expensive; your employer isn’t picking up 75 percent of the premium. Personally, I’d rather have marginal tax rates go up and see some of that $5,000 in my paycheck. I’m certain that one reason why wages have been stagnating is the cost of health care, and workers still have to pay a shitload out of pocket.

  26. The money paid to private insurance companies is pretty much just a donation; you’re donating to a charity for millionaires rather than starving African children. Leave it to Republicans to think that this is the most perfect phenomenon ever.

  27. As one of the evil bastards in health insurance, any of you who are actually naive enough to think private insurance is better than universal medicare-type plans I’d just like to say, “Bwaa, ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaa, ha, ha, ha…” Really you are complete morons. Private insurance is racket. You can pay in for years as a healthy young person, but the minute you seek treatment for an illness the insurance company will shriek ‘pre-existing condition’ (everything up to death is a pre-existing condition BTW) and you’ll be dropped from the rolls. You can try and sue them but they have a legal department that rakes in billions, not millions a year, to defend them in court and you will likely be too broke to afford a lawyer of your own. Make no mistake, the ‘death panelers’ are shills for the Insurance companies. My company has a PAC that doles out millions per year to politicians to keep their monopoly and billions in profit. Why do you think every other civilized nation in the world has socialized medicine and we don’t?

  28. Tell it, Dan. This is EXACTLY the shit that needs to be told to America b/c it’s the gospel truth.

    But, you’re preaching to the choir here.

    Get your ass on FOX news or CNN ASA-effing-P and tell that shit to the rest of America.

    Thank you for being incisive as always. You rule.

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