I’ve been busy with other (paying) work and pondering how to make this blog useful. Haven’t figured that out yet…I think this niche may be a place to talk about the specifics of negotiating your bills down. I don’t see anyone talking about that much.
But they are talking a lot about how healthcare bills are knocking the stuffing out of average people out there. I think that’s why healthcare reform is finally gaining momentum. Even businesspeople are recognizing how the offerings of the insurance industry are not really helping them and their employees pay for medical care in a realistic way.
For instance, I just talked this week with a small business owner in Tennessee who takes pride in providing health insurance to his employees even when others in his industry do not. But keeping up with the double-digit premium increases has been a challenge. So a couple of years ago he switched to a high-deductible plan. Pretty soon he and his employees were finding themselves at the pharmacy and instead of paying a $30 copay, they had to pay the whole $150 price tag of a medication. They were blowing through their $2000 deductible quickly. More importantly, the design of these plans forces an individual to pay full retail or try to figure out how to negotiate the price down in a market that’s not designed for haggling. The pharmacy tech isn’t interested in bargaining over a price, she just charges you the list price.
This business owner had enough of this craziness after a year and switched back to a plan that gives his people some actual coverage and help dealing with a system that was never meant for civilians to interact with on their own.
Beyond the expense, I think these folks paid an emotional cost in the stress of yet another area of their lives where they’re left on their own in an unacceptably complex marketplace. It’s fine to give people some responsibility for their health when they have a fighting chance to succeed — walk around the block, turn down that donut at the staff meeting. But throwing them to the wolves of our insane medical billing system, which is barely understood by the experts, is just unfair.