Current Events > Health Insurance is such a joke

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So, i lost my job and with it my health insurance. Now i have some savings and unemployment coming in so i decided to go and get my own private insurance.

Now before i had insurance through work i paid roughly around 130 a month. Since i live in CA i have to go through Covered California apparently and its telling me its going to be 350 a month for health insurance. WTF is this scam

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It always cost that much. Before, your company subsidized it. Private health insurance is a scam.

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Businesses cover something like 60 or for 70% of healthcare costs. That's why getting Insurance independently so wildly expensive. It's also the thing nobody talks about with plans like Medicare for all, where eliminating employer health insurance means that rather than companies covering most of the cost of a plan, your taxes are going to have to cover the full cost of the plan. For everyone. And nobody is going to see a pay raise to make up for it.

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warlock7735 posted...

It always cost that much. Before, your company subsidized it. Private health insurance is a scam.

Ive had insurance through my jobs my whole adult life. Damn this shit sucks. I knew it was getting covered mostly by employers but i never knew the difference was so great

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I4NRulez posted...

Ive had insurance through my jobs my whole adult life. Damn this shit sucks. I knew it was getting covered mostly by employers but i never knew the difference was so great

It's one of the reasons why benefits are considered part of your compensation package when you apply for a job. Because the amount of money they're throwing in to your health insurance combined with things like base pay, bonus options, vacation time, Etc all together represents the amount they are investing into you and your career. It's why sometimes people will get a job that doesn't pay quite as well if the benefits are better, or why people feel like they have suddenly gotten a pay cut if their benefits are slashed. It's all tied together.

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s0nicfan posted...

Businesses cover something like 60 or for 70% of healthcare costs. That's why getting Insurance independently so wildly expensive. It's also the thing nobody talks about with plans like Medicare for all, where eliminating employer health insurance means that rather than companies covering most of the cost of a plan, your taxes are going to have to cover the full cost of the plan. For everyone. And nobody is going to see a pay raise to make up for it.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to put a new healthcare tax on larger companies that would be equal in cost to what they were paying for healthcare prior to medicare for all, and employees just pay whatever premium they were paying before to a healthcare tax as well. Maybe that could offset the cost enough to make it doable.

As for the topic at hand, yeah it's fucking bullshit. It's absurd that they can take hundreds of dollars form you monthly when you don't even go to the doctor or get medicine anyways. They're just leeching money because they know people are scared of getting ruined for life by a medical emergency.

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Squall28 posted...

I wonder if it would be a good idea to put a new healthcare tax on larger companies that would be equal in cost to what they were paying for healthcare prior to medicare for all, and employees just pay whatever premium they were paying before to a healthcare tax as well. Maybe that could offset the cost enough to make it doable.

That's one option, but it would be complicated by the fact that what companies offer their employees varies wildly and their out-of-pocket expense is drastically different depending on what insurance companies are in their state. A flat tax wouldn't do very much because some companies would end up paying way less and some companies would go bankrupt, but figuring out what the formula should look like to perfectly match what everybody's currently paying might be too hard to try and force. And you would probably also have to have provisions in there that would prevent companies from just jacking up the cost of their goods to offset this new tax, which is historically a bad idea and difficult to enforce.

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