Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Doing Without Health Insurance
silence1186
Character shields down!Registered User regular
Character shields down!Registered User regular
Long story short, I'm not continuing University in the fall. What this chiefly means is I am getting dropped from my parent's health insurance, since I'm not a full time student. Just wondering what my options are, as I have no experience in this sort of situation.
silence1186 on
Pink Floyd wrote:Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what's behind these cold eyes
You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise.
Posts
Unless something awful happens, it's much cheaper, and if something awful happens, you just have to declare bankruptcy after racking up several tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. It would suck, but given the price of insurance, it's a risk I'm willing to take.
Your advice is usually pretty sound, but this seems a bit silly. You can get very cheap high deductable insurance assuming you are in decent condition. In many states, you can get high deductable insurance for 20-40 a month which will cover you for catastrophes. It's basically there for if you get into a horrible expensive accident.
The important thing is to not let your coverage lapse. If you do that you end up giving any new insurer a six+ month window to deny your claims as pre-existing conditions, among other things.
YES
Do everything you can not to let your coverage lapse.
You might get lucky and get a job with an employer whose insurance plan will waive any pre-existing conditions, but you might not. Having any lapse in coverage if you can at all avoid it is a bad idea.
I was kicked off health insurance through my company due to an administrative error (needed to manually re-enroll). So the money that would've went to my health care was instead put into my 401(k). I didn't find this out until months later. I took the same chance as Thanatos and said, fuck it. I'm young and healthy, nothing will happen.
Three weeks ago I dislocated my knee in the dojo. Ambulance came ($250) and rushed me to the emergency room ($200). The radiologist took 4 x-rays ($140) and didn't see any broken bones ($50). So they gave me crutches ($100), a re-usable ice pack ($130) and some motrin ($.40). I walked out 2 hours later.
The total bill was around $750 that I paid myself. Had I been covered it would've come to between $280 to $300. I consider myself lucky, had I been in a high-cost of living area my bill would've been much higher.
Edit: Blue Cross/ Blue shield has excellent coverage, although they're a bit pricey. They should have basic coverage in the $30 to $40 range.
Insurance companies are scared about people trying to game the system so if an individual tries to buy health insurance they just assume that they are the walking dead. Automatic enrollment is the only thing that allows the bean counters to sleep nights. Also California.
What would being in California have to do with it?
For example, say I tripped and went unconscious, and found myself in a hospital when I woke up? Would I be within my rights to leave immediately?
Where do you live?? In IL it's $500 for an ambulance and $750 to walk into the emergency room. It's just as expensive here in IA. I got AFLAC insurance to cover major stuff for $96 a month without my employer's discount, $42 a month with my employer's discount.
California has a rep of being a bad place to try and get insurance. I only know this anecdotally talking to people at work who put this sort of stuff together. I don't think lapses of coverage are as important to insurace companies as active choice on the part of the consumer. Also BMI could do it. They could just have a hard and fast rule to exclude or price rape anyone over a certain number.
So you're talking a difference of, generously, $500. How much were you paying per month in insurance? I'm guess the accumulative amount you saved was a helluva lot more than $500, and that you're still well in the black, all considered.
This is the sort of risk you're talking about. One option is to take as much as you can afford, which is probably less than a good policy, and stick it in a savings account as an emergency fund. If something happens, you can tap into it. If nothing happens, you have a nice savings account, and when you finally get coverage again, you can blow it on something fun.
Going without health coverage is a risk, yes. It's not smart, it's not stupid, it's just a risk. So is going without collision insurance on your car, or renter's insurance for your apartment, or dozens of other things. Are you fairly healthy? How often have you visited a doctor or gone to a hospital over the course of your life? If you've gone 10 years without seeing a doctor, maybe you're comfortable going a year or two without coverage.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
This is what you want to get.
It's very cheap, will cover you in case anything bad happens, and you don't need to worry about gaps in case something bad does happen. Nothing worse than someone hitting you with a car, only for the next insurance plan to qualify whatever happened to you as "pre-existing."
Do not get COBRA, do not look into the "continuing plans" unless they're very, very cheap. Get short term health insurance and look for a plan that's going to cover you at least a little bit and for approximately the amount of time you'll probably be without coverage.
Its something to at least look into.