I don't know what "being under-insured" means.
I think when healthcare reform advocates use the phrase they are talking about the healthcare situation of families like mine, but I'm not sure. Maybe you can help me sort it out.
I don't consider my family to be under-insured. It's not more insurance my family needs, it's more healthcare - or more money to pay for that healthcare. Even though we have "insurance coverage" that is probably about average for private sector employer participating insurance, the endless stream of gotchas that the insurance bloodsuckers embed in their policies means that we don't dare use it anymore.
In our case, that stream of gotchas include a $2,500 annual deductible for each of our three family members. There is also a use fee - $25 for doctor office and $100 for ER - that I think is still commonly referred to as a co-pay. Co-pay. That's one of those genius terms that is designed to make you feel like that extra reach of their hand into your pocket is natural and fair. But it's a use fee, plain and simple. Then, there's the $3,755.40 we paid (last year anyway) for the illusion of being insured. That's the part they call "the premium" and it really makes us feel special to pay it by calling it premium. Or not.
The reason we don't dare to use our American made insurance anymore is that we had to use it a number of years back, and after a course of medical treatment and follow-up, we found ourselves with medical bills totalling something like $11,000. And we had insurance at the time. Is that what is meant by "being under-insured"? The only way we could pay that sum off (an amount equal to almost a quarter of our combined gross income at the time) was to take money out of our house by refinancing into an ARM. We were just able to get back into a conventional 30 year fixed about a year before the housing bubble burst.
So here we sit in our unmodernized 1928 vintage bungalow. Unmodernized meaning uninsulated lath and plaster with marginally safe 2 wire electrical circuits. I mention the quality of our house because if the previously mentioned medical treatment hadn't been such a financial burden, we would have used a re-fi to update it. But that's okay, you know? We can live with that. Literally. And I suppose we shouldn't bitch too much because we haven't lost our home.
But what we can't take is another major episode with the medical industry. So here we sit. We wonder if this ache or that pain is a re-lapse. We diagnose ourselves online to derive assurance that that particular kind of skin rash is nothing serious. We learn to sit in the ER parking lot, hoping that the chest tightness subsides, but at least we are close by if it doesn't. We calculate how many years past 50 we can safely wait to get that colonoscopy. We hope that somehow, some day, the beltway electeds will realize that only removing the private sector profit motive from healthcare in America will seriously reform how Americans receive healthcare.
In the mean time, you'll have to excuse us for not being overly enthusiastic about the president's leadership on healthcare reform. You'll have to pardon us our tendency to go to a really dark place when we read the words underinsured or premiums or co-pays or deductibles or the perfect being the enemy of the good or about how if we like what we have now, we can keep it. You'll have to forgive us for seeing every health-related PSA and every malady fighting nonprofit that push us to go see the doctor as nothing more than another conduit (like drug commercials) for delivering dollars from our pockets to the expense accounts of medical industry executives.
It is clearer to us every day, that the sausage being made right now in Washington is of such poor quality that it will make no significant difference to us. We will, essentially, be choking down the same over-priced product we've been swallowing all along.
So I ask, for those of you who made it all the way through my rant, do you think my family is under-insured?