This article is about hidden "other" costs of Health Insurance.
My father was a farm laborer and we were poor, --poor enough that I didn't go to a real barber until I was twenty one. For our formative years, Pop was the Barber, and Mom was the Nurse. Mom didn't know much about teeth, so I saw a dentist for the first time after landing a teaching job when I was thirty-five years old. My teaching job came with great pay and "full benefits". I soon discovered a hidden cost to the "almost free" medical care.
Impacted wisdom teeth are painful, and I had been suffering for several years before that first teaching job. Imagine my relief, and the dentist's glee, when we met for the first time. With his skills and my dental insurance, he saw only one problem. My insurance would not be effective until I had been with the Lodi School district for a full school year. "No problem, we will do the work, and bill the insurance when it is available". I was leery, but also in pain. My dentist did excellent work, and there was only one glitch-- his secretary was off by one week when she backdated the bill. None of the dental work was covered by insurance. She made a mistake, but my dental insurance would pay nothing; the dentist and I split the bill. It took me four years to pay off the bill.
That was not the biggest, hidden cost to my Medical Health Insurance though. Because of my Blue Cross insurance, I had access to the best medicine that America had to offer.
I was a pack a-day smoker, had an elevated (but not high) blood pressure, 20#'s overweight and lived the "stressful" life of a teacher. In a normal doctor visit, I mentioned some minor discomfort that triggered a referral to a Cardiologist. that was in his medical group. The cardiologist ordered a CAT scan to see how the old ticker was doing. My world fell apart........ with their new machines, they could show me the cost of all that pizza, all those cigarettes, all that late night parting in college showed up in my veins, and they ordered that I be transported by ambulance-- they would not let me drive-- thirty miles away to Sacramento. I was to undergo emergency angioplasty that same day.
The cardiologist said I was a walking time bomb, and he insisted that I do no more walking until he operated on me. I needed time to think..... from his VCR's, and consultations, I knew it was major medical, and I would have to be aware that many, many things could go wrong. But, I had no choice.
Fortunately, as it worked out, bad-luck gave me a choice. That emergency angioplasty was scheduled in 1976, just as California passed it's well known Proposition 13, which cost me my tenured teaching job--and ended my health insurance. My cardiologist said "be careful", and gave me a small bottle of nitroglycerin which I was to have on my body 24 hours per day until I found another job with insurance. The Doc said I should not daly, my life was in extreme danger. Boy, you talk about adding to my stress level!
I went to prison right after that. As it turned out, California State Prison wasn't such a bad place to be. The pay was great, the best teaching job I ever had, and once again I had full medical and dental coverage.
My coverage at the Prison was supplied by Kaiser Permanente. I cannot say enough good things about Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser's approach is based on keeping their costs down, by keeping me healthy. A simple approach and it works for them, and for me.
I told my Kaiser Doctor's that I needed angioplasty, and they ran me through the works trying to find out where to start cutting. They never found a vein that needed reaming out. I never needed the angioplasty in the first place.
Thirty years later, I still have high blood pressure, and I take Verapamil to keep it under control. Big Pharma brought us the wonders of Verapamil, and I suppose I should be forever grateful-- but let me take another bite out of that hand that feeds us. Verapamil costs several hundred dollars (per month) at a local pharmacy. As a Kaiser member, I only have a $5 co-pay. As a retiree, we do a little traveling, and a while back we happened to be in a pharmacy in Costa Rico. I had a great discussion with the pharmacists about their evil "socialized" medicine. I questioned what would happen if I lost my pills while visiting in their country--could I buy enough pills to get me home? The pharmacist did not believe that we would require a prescription for Verapamil "It can't be addictive!". She handed me a small envelope of Verapamil, and said it cost twenty five cents. If I wanted a months supply of generic, it would be only pennies.
I have been covered by Kaiser Permanente for over 30 years now, added more than 30 pounds to the scale--and no sign of ugly veins yet!
I don't need angioplasty now, and I probably didn't need it in 1976. Was the cardiologist lying? Probably not, but as the old saying goes: if you are a hammer, everyone else looks like a nail. To further paraphrase that old saying: If your big Pharma, everyone else looks like a sucker and must learn to fear "death panels" and "socialized" medicine.