I’m 57 years old, a decade from retirement. As the legal guardian for my elderly mom, I’ve been impressed how easy it is to manage her healthcare, which is covered by Medicare. Government single payer insurance.
With the Repeal, Replace efforts underway, I checked out the Medicare.gov web site to gain an understanding how Medicare bills its enrollees and to see what I may have to pay in retirement. As a small business co-owner with my brother, I pay monthly premiums of $585 with a deductible of $6800.
According to Medicare.gov, if a person has paid into Medicare during working years, Part A (hospitalization) is free. I learned that if a person reaches retirement age and hadn’t paid into Medicare prior to retirement, that person can still buy into Part A for a monthly premium of about $430. The Medicare Part B (doctors) premium is $134 a month. The Part D drug benefit costs about $40 a month in my area. That’s a monthly premium of about $604 if I had to buy into Part A.
Here’s the big kicker. My private insurance obstacle is $6800 a year. Under Medicare, the annual Part B deductible for people earning under $80,000 a year in retirement is $183 annually. A 20% copay can be charged in some situations. What’s your preference? A private free market insurance obstacle of $6800 per year or a government single payer deductible of $183 per year?
Look, the ACA has nothing to do with rising insurance obstacles. The private insurance market has big data up the wazoo. The high obstacles are calculated price points meant to limit access to spending premium payments for health care by forcing customers to pay an annual amount that most customers can’t afford before health care payments are made by customer premiums. The high deductible is an intentional obstacle. With 42% of working Americans earning under $15 per hour (from the book “The Fight for Fifteen”), half of working Americans can’t afford spending $6800 of their income year after year on health care. Does this insurance obstacle really surprise anyone? The free market insurance industry’s interest is in making a profit off your premiums, not in paying for your medical care. We’ve seen that evidence for decades. Call the insurance deductible what it is: an insurance obstacle.
On a side note, I keep hearing Republican congressmen speak about how many areas of the country have only one insurer on the ACA exchange. Remember, the insurance companies have big data up the wazoo. I’d ask these congressmen how many luxury car dealers are in these same areas? How many 3 and 4 star hotels and restaurants? What percentage of the population falls in the healthy 26 to 40 range? There’s only one insurer in these areas because private insurers decided that there’s not enough wealth, population, or potential payees in the prime age range to bother entering that market. I got a sense of this during my business’ annual workmen’s comp audit. I commented to the auditor that the insurance company must be doing well because of all the expansion to the main office building. He told me that the company was now in six states, and he explained how they carefully review all data and only move into counties and areas that have sufficient population and wealth. In Texas, they are in the Dallas Fort Worth area, but certainly not in the rural counties. It’s the same with healthcare insurance.