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justme
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2010 Dec 28, 2:11am
That's amazing. And this is the "very healthy person" rate, I'm almost certain.
Patrick
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2010 Dec 28, 2:15am
Yes, it seems to be the rate they charge everyone the age of my wife and myself with kids. We jog, eat mostly vegetarian, and don't smoke.
For a while I thought it was because we did need to use the insurance last year, but that's not it. They even sent me their chart to show that my premium is the same as everyone else in my age and family category.
They're just screwing everyone equally.
Blue Shield screws over the doctors in their system as well. They suddenly decide to withhold 60-80k in payments and dare the doctors to sue them. They have an army of lawyers ready to bankrupt any doctor that tries. I've seen them do it to 3 physicians in the past year.
Yep, healthcare is so royally fucked in this country. The insurance companies cry and weep publicly, and then work nonstop to screw us on the back end. The solution is to do away with them, whether that's a free market system, or a single player system, or mixed like Singapore. American health insurers are just holding us all hostage, even the retards who think the current system is a free market are affected.
Patrick
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2010 Dec 28, 5:44am
Yes, I agree. Insurance companies should not even exist, except for small optional treatments.
For life-or-death catastrophic coverage, there never was a free market and never will be. You risk bankrupcy or death for your family members if you don't pay whatever they say. That's no market. It's extortion.
Even more than national defense, the first priority of government should be protection of the lives and assets of its citizens from this kind of extortion. This means the insurance companies must get out of the way.
Every other industrialized country pays half as much per person as the US, for better care, because they have a government option or a single-payer system.
The only explanation for our f'd up system is legalized corruption, also called lobbying and campaign donations. Well, that and "the retards who think the current system is a free market" referred to so accurately by Blue-collar in the comment above.
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Blue Shield has raised our rates so many times recently that I decided to graph it.
We have a very high deductible plan because I'm trying to be self-employed and that's all I could afford on my own. There is an $8000 per person deductible so it covers basically nothing but catastrophic care. Now it's $777 per month. It was $447 per month a year ago. This is utterly insane. 73% in one year! Here's the future if this keeps up:
2011: $1344 per month
2012: $2325 per month
2013: $4022 per month
2014: $6958 per month
2015: $12,037 per month
2016: $20,824 per month
Of course I'm shopping for other insurance via http://www.healthcare.gov/ but so far none of the others seem to be much cheaper.
Blue Shield claims that their own costs have gone up 19%. So WTF did they raise my premiums 73%? Isn't there any law against price gouging?
This all pleases our corporate masters of course, because the need for health insurance prevents small entrepreneurs from competing with them. It also makes employees into obedient servants.
#insurance