In the fourth episode of Breaking Bad Walter White comes clean with his family about his lung cancer diagnosis. They react in different way, unsurprisingly. His wife, Skyler, tries to stay optimistic. She first insists he get a second opinion then urges him to pursue treatment with the best cancer specialist around. The best don't come cheap, ( Read more... )

I saw an interesting article in my newsfeed earlier this week. It's "Are You Richer Than You Think? A Surprising Number Of People Consider Themselves 'Poor' But They're Actually In The Top 10% Of Earners" (Yahoo Finance, 20 Feb 2024). Well, the headline was interesting. The question posed by the article is interesting. But, alas, the article itself ( Read more... )

A news story has popped up in my newsfeed multiple times this past week, as different outlets picked up on it. A study released recently found that retirees fear running out of money more than death. When I first saw that headline I thought about it for a moment and said, "Well, duh!In the US running out of money in older age is a real, legitimate ( Read more... )

Last week I wrote about a prescription medicine that used to be free now costing me $2,000/year after my employer switched health care plans. Since then I've explored a few alternatives. Unfortunately the news gets worse.

• I met with my doctor and explained the situation. I asked to switch back to a different drug I took a few years ago that worked ( Read more... )

I got bad news when I went to refill one of my prescriptions last week. I now have to pay $2,000 for it. Previously my out of pocket cost was zero.

What changed? My company changed insurance carriers effective January 1. Although both my old plan and my new plan are HDHPs/HSAs with similar specs on paper, one of the hard-to-figure-out-in-advance ( Read more... )

Well, my prescription drugs are no longer free. The pleasant surprise I had in August when all of the regular prescription medicines I take became free of charge has been undone. It's not that the insurer backtracked on its policy of making preventive drugs available at zero copayment; it's that my company switched its selection of healthcare plans ( Read more... )

My company is switching up its health care plans. The change is unexpected because we're in the middle of a plan year. Yes, our plans have run from July 1 to June 30 so far. That's been annoying because while the plans run on that cycle, certain important things related to them, like say deductibles and tax limits, run on a Jan 1 - Dec 31 cycle. ( Read more... )

I filled a prescription at the pharmacy yesterday and it was... free. So was a different prescription I filled several weeks ago. I haven't seen this since... well, ever. Even back in the 1990s there was a $5 co-pay on filling a prescription ( Read more... )

Yesterday I wrote about 5 kinds of people- other than "the poor"- who benefit from the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. It brings affordable health insurance to nearly 36 million Americans. Some readers might wonder why, though, I sang the praises of this insurance program when just two days earlier I wrote Insurance Is A Racket, explaining that ( Read more... )

I saw a headline today in the newsfeed, "Record 35 million Americans have health coverage through ACA" (CNN.com, 29 Apr 2022). The article explains how that number is up from 27 million two years ago. And the current figure is actually 35.8 million today- closer to 36 than the 35 in the headline. That represents almost 11% of the US population ( Read more... )