Housing and Health Care

U

usta in Portland

Daily Driver
Yesterday I read an article which indicated that the health care overhaul was showing its first effects. This manifested itself as a rise of nearly 3/4 million newly insured. 600K of these were reported to be young people under 26 years of age who were being added to their parent's policy. The report also said that health insurers had posted record profits in the Q1 of 2011. Needless to say this begs a few questions but what I got interested in was the relationship of health insurance cost to the cost of housing on a median basis.
The best number I found for health insurance median cost was $13,400/year/family of 4. so let's call that $1100/month. Then I found the current median price of a single family dwelling in the USA which is $160,000 roughly. then the current prevailing 30 year mortgage at say 5% . So with a 20% down payment and the 5% loan the monthly payment is something like $865. then there would be taxes,PI etc. So let's call it $1100/mo roughly.
This comparison makes the top of my head want to come off!!!!
Do any of these numbers align with anything y'all know directly?
 
I can not address the 2nd part of your post, but the 1st part is very true

I have a small business with 20+ employees. We offer health care at employee pays 25% employer pays 75%. All my younger employees dropped the plan to go back on their parents insurance. Therefore my average age of employee went up almost 4 years in one year. This caused a 45% increase in my insurance costs.

If the new health care bill did not happen, my rates would have gone up 6%. This is why health insurance companies wanted this part of the health care bill. They will make big profits on big increases for the companies that provide health care to employees.
 
That's distressing....

thanks for sharing this info:sigh:

Do you think that $13,400/year for family of 4 bears any relationship to the real world? It sounded implausibly high to me but I only have numbers for my wife and me to compare and we are 55-60 years old so the rate is high.
 
If the $13.4K is the real number it's no wonder the insurance companies have record profits. I don't think the average cost would be $13K/year if everyone paid for all health care directly out of pocket. The insurance companies love all this government intervention. It protects them from competition that would surely come from smaller companies if it was easy to get into the health insurance business. Health insurance companies are the only companies I've ever dealt with that treat you like a hassle they would rather not deal with. No company could survive in the free market the way they operate. Health insurance companies have become government protected semi-monopolies.
 
I think things in the medical world are going to take a big tumble...

My employer, and most other railroads I know of, are making all of their non-union employees go to high deductible healthcare plans...

And they suck.

The companies love them because they send significantly less money to the insurance provider. They are cheaper because, simply put, they offer less real coverage... suddenly the consumer has either a good sized 'out of pocket' annual deductible, or they have a small amount of 'company money in their health savings account' and a HUGE ANNUAL DEDUCTIBLE... and the net result is they simply do not go to the doctor for things that they can live with. I have two boys... used to if one woke up with a temp and throwing up, he didn't go to school and we might as well take him to the doc to get their opinion, after all it only cost me a $20 deductible. And being observant parents we knew that it was almost always going to be 'a virus because of the high temp, and there isn't anything we really can prescribe'. We'd go home and they'd throw up a time or two as we controlled the temp with motrin. My kids have only gone to the doc like 4 times in the last 3 years on this plan. Screw paying $150 for an office visit only to be told 'it's some sort of virus...' I'm saving the cash. Doctors are no longer making $800-1000 or so a year off my kids.
My wife and I are worse, the only visits I've made are for my free annual 'well-checks'... her too. We are not going for stuff like a pounding headache accompaning a sinus infection... I fight it off with over the counter meds and in 3 or 4 days I'm all better.

So, the insurance companies used to make a lot more off my family/company with larger payments for a plan that cost me and my company more, but that I used more... and the doctors aren't even making 1/2 the cash they used to from my family and our frequent visits. We have effectively dropped off the map medical cash outlay wise, all due to the fact that I have a now $9200 a year family deductible to meet. I'm trying to save my HSA cash for that big emergency every parents knows is coming. (my boys wrapped a go-kart around a tree the other night for example... go-kart is severly bent... thankfully we didn't have any broken bones or gashes that required an emergency room visit... that's what my HSA is for now!)

What happens to the medical industry monster when more and more American's simply quit going like we have? How are the docs going to pay for the Porsche's, college loans, and new office buildings they love to build? How can the insurance industry keep making their HUGE profits if everyone goes to HDHP's because they are dirt cheap compared to the previous HMO styled plans? Less money in equals less money in right?

I can't see how the ball can keep rolling with the HDHP plans gaining steam.
 
Doesn't seem far off the mark. Note that's just the cost for Insurance premiums. Add in the actual healthcare costs for the many things that aren't fully covered or reimbursed and the number goes up more. I hate the fact that it is tied to employment status.

This is one of my major hot buttons, but I'm going to self-censor becasue it would very quickly turn political :hmm2:
 
Sounds familiar...

we dropped our coverage after my wife retired because it was going to cost us nearly $11,000/year. My wife and I combined have probably had non-dental medical costs of maybe $2000 in the last 22 years. I have not spent more than a cumulative 1 hour in a medical office or hospital in that time and my wife has had only OB-GYN checkups, which amounted to a nurse practioner doing a Pap Smear once a year. For all this her employer was forking out somewhere around $6000/year average for 22 years!
We are just gambling on making it to Medicare age before anything ruinous happens. I wouldn't even mind buying true catastrophic coverage, but it really does not exist and of course we can only buy within Oregon ( not that it matters,everywhere is expensive).
It's the raw cost that is the problem-at over 17% of GDP,America pays 60-70% more on that metric than the OECD average. Singapore's national system costs them 4% of GDP and they are significantly healthier. It looks like the health reform has done little more than add some high profit young to the insurers books and it is anyone's guess if that will ever actually offset any costs of sicker people. How could anyone prove that it did or didn't? I guess we would just have to take their word for whatever the costs are and pay them.
All of this is going to wind up throwing the "..unplug Granny.." issue up in everyone's face. The cost of end-of-life-care is just staggering and at what point will a younger electorate just say 'no more'. I think this is what Ryan's voucher idea is all about-to partition off those costs and shift them away from the government. And maybe there is an inescapable logic to it too.
 
I know what you mean....

but I am of the mind that at some point arthimetic is going to trump politics. Paul Ryan said something a few days ago that got kind of buried in all the 'Mediscare' tactics in NY state. He said in essence that it wasn't an issue of whether Medicare was going to change-that's inescapable because it runs through its trust in 2024. Truer words haven't been spoken in politics in quite a while.
I could not agree more about the tie to employment-costs are hidden and people do not respond to what they do not see. Face writing a mortgage size check every month to an insurer and I bet a lot of folks would get real political real fast.
 
The other problem I see in the healthcare quagmire is people are learning that it's apparently not the end of the world if you just don't pay the bill.

Let it go to collections, and settle for 30% or so when they come around and start threatening court.

Again, I work for a railroad, and all my co-workers are well paid and medically covered. But since we went to the new HDHP I know of several who have just not paid stuff like $2200 bills for an x-ray and a cast. They've let it go to collections and when it comes around, they're willing to settle for $600-700 bucks. One of my friends has fought bills with both of his last kids and had over $20k in hospital bills bearing down. When his old Honda Civic got totalled a little over a year ago he was in a near panic because he knew he had tons of late payments, failure to pay type bills, etc, that would show on his credit. He went car shopping and when they started working on the paperwork for the Toyota Sienna he said the car salesmen was like "Don't worry, all this late payment stuff is medical related, they won't even blink at it." And now his wife is cruising in the Sienna.

Apparently it's now acceptable to blow off payments and such if they are medical related? That right there tells you something is wrong with the whole industry and everyone knows it.
 
A trend.

I have heard of a trend for some larger companies to simply hire a doctor full time as the cost to pay this person along with a drug coverage is cheaper than the rates they would pay otherwise.

The greed is getting out of hand.

Eric.
 
Once again I gotta spout in... you know Railroads, like I work for, used to have freaking doctors and Hospitals! Of course railroads used to kill and maim tons of workers too! But in several large cities some of the oldest buildings are railroad depots, and railroad hospitals...

Of course at some point they decided to outsource, but still... according to this 'railway surgeon' page that was an easy google, by the early 20th century all major railroads had their own staff of doctors!
http://railwaysurgery.org/HistoryShort.htm


And of course the military does this too... you can find lots of people who'll complain about healthcare while serving in the military, but my family NEVER* had a complaint till my dad got out and we had to go to civilian doctors. I wonder what % the military pays on healthcare for it's personel compared to the civilian 'for-profit' system screwed populace?




* (Well there was this one time my little sister got bit by a neighbors rabbit... my mom drove us to the clinic at Little Creek Naval Operations Base to see if my sisters tetnus shot was up to date... turns out hers was, but mine wasn't... so I got the shot! I'm still pissed, she got bit by some fleabag rabbit, yet I get the damn shot!)
 
Pretty obvious that healthcare in our country really ticks me off... I've been thinking of starting a thread about my father in laws last year with colon cancer surgery... but it would really be just a crybaby thread about how the industry is 100% willing to overmedicate and throw away old people just to keep them quiet. I'll just say that if my wife hadn't have been in his room, sometimes as much as 16+ hours a day for over 2 straight months, he'd be dead right now. She had to stay on top of what meds they were giving him, what he was eating, etc because the lack of real observation by doctors and knowledgable staff was basically nil. It is catastrophic how many clueless people are out there handing out medications to patients... not knowing what side effects to look for, etc.

It's easy to see how people like Glen Beck will stomp around cheering 'the best medical industry in the world' when it serves their political agenda, but then when he's in the hospital he is appalled by the service he's given.
 
Doctors don't really work for the patients they work for the insurance companies. This is because health insurance isn't really insurance but rather pre-paid health care. It really irritates me that I can't even buy actual health insurance. There is a market for it if regulations would allow it.
 
What do you mean by....

'health insurance' ?

You're right that what we call health insurance is something more akin to a prepaid fund or a co-op for profit or whatever. But what is your idea of an alternative? I have heard this line of thinking somewhere else but don't really understand it.:)
 
All I really want is something like my car insurance or home owner's insurance. I'll pay the premium and pay for all routine check ups and minor injuries and illness. If something bad happens I file a claim and they pay for it. Imagine how much your car insurance would cost if maintenance and repairs were covered after a $20 co-pay.
 
Matthew said:
All I really want is something like my car insurance or home owner's insurance. I'll pay the premium and pay for all routine check ups and minor injuries and illness. If something bad happens I file a claim and they pay for it. Imagine how much your car insurance would cost if maintenance and repairs were covered after a $20 co-pay.
Click to expand...

That's what I have now... except you also have a big deductible... if something bad happens in my household I'm libel for $9200 a year out of pocket, then they kick in... 80/20 if it's out of network too! So you'd better have your emergency surgery or whatever at a in network hospital or you might be libel for several more grand!
 
The problem as I have had it explained...

is that the level of liablity of covering health care costs are fabulously higher than anything else in insurance and it isn't so much an issue of IF you will be making a big claim against it but WHEN.
The insurer could, and likely will, be on the hook for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars at the end of life of a lot their policy holders. That's an entirely different actuarial situation than car or liability or home insurance where only a small percentage ever make claims at the upper reaches of coverage. And those policies are tied to things like the present value of your car or they have fairly low payout limits. The comparison to health insurance is pretty shaky. Part of the problem in the whole discussion of health insurance is calling it that to begin with-much the same could be said of calling Social Security 'insurance' while it does 'insure' against outright poverty in old age (or not actually) it is not acturial and is not, in fact, funded by the insurance pool as is real insurance. We would be better off to start calling these things by more accurate names.
 
Very interesting stats....

I think we have become blind to just how much cheaper consumer goods are now than they used to be. I was in Target store the other day for the first time in years and was just blown away at how cheaply they were selling things. Given that individual incomes have flat lined for 40 years it's a good thing the price of basics has come down.

There is a bit of a disconnect in the article that I don't quite understand -on the one hand it makes a good case that the 'over consumption' myth is just that,but on the other hand it states up front that households overall are 75% richer than a generation ago. That seems, on the face of it, an awfully big cushion to absorb a pretty big increase in housing and health insurance and cars and day care. So why the profound rise in bankruptcy, foreclosures, credit defaults. It must have something to do with the problem of averages as against individual cases but I'm still having a hard time reconciling it.

Great article-need to look at the Boston Review more!:)
 
Good questions.

usta said "So why the profound rise in bankruptcy, foreclosures, credit defaults."

because we spend quite a bit more of items considered necessary which either did not exist or were not necessary back generations ago. Cell phones, TV, etc.

I was just looking at my cell phone bill the other day, for a family of five with three phones it is over $140 a month. That is on top of our home phone costs. Then there is Internet, TV, Gym memberships, etc..

Think of all the trivial crap we buy all the time. It adds up very quickly.

Eric
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top