Lesson learned...
Lack of sleep + "cowboy coffee" = Grey sitting at her computer trying not to puke up said coffee.
I was up until about 2:30a going through all of the different health insurance plans BCBS offers. I'd gotten it down from 40+ choices to around six before my brain started refusing to understand math.
If I haven't tortured you guys on here with my rants, due to BCBS recently deciding to randomly raise my rates with no explanation, K and I are now paying $1551 every two months for health insurance. Going through the new plans they offer now, I was half happy to find that I can get us decent insurance for less than a third of that, and half irritated that they don't have ANY plans, not even their "Wow, this covers everything!" plan, that comes anywhere close to being as expensive as ours. WTF?
Of course, I also know the quoted rates are BS because when we got our original policies and paid up-front for the first two months, we received notification about a month later that my rates were going up because apparently they'd just noticed I was a female, and then almost DOUBLING again after that because they decided to nail me with a "pre-existing condition" of migraines that I still haven't been able to get removed despite the fact that they say that "pre-existing conditions" only apply for 48 months, and I haven't had a migraine for about ten years now. (And DON'T get me started on all the people fighting the new healthcare laws that will finally make this illegal.) They made me jump through a million hoops with doctor's notes and medical records, only to finally deny my dispute because I'd been to a chiropractor. Not for migraines. Whose visits they didn't cover anyway. I kept planning to dispute it again, but I felt like such a kicked puppy after that that I just kept ignoring it until this recent rate increase.
The plan I'm looking at has a $5000 deductible. (For those of you in other countries with a much less stupid healthcare system, that means I have to pay the first $5000 toward things like emergency room visits and surgeries before insurance covers the rest. That's mostly a worry for huge things. "Preventative" care, like my yearly doc visits, are free, and other doc visits are between $35-75 on this particular plan.) Our current plan has a $1500 deductible, which is nice if we plan to have bad things happen to us, but otherwise, the $500 or so a month the new plan saves us will make up the difference in about seven months. Fourteen months to cover the deductible difference for both of us. I'd so much rather use that money to pay down my credit cards even if, god-forbid, something does happen and I have to put that $5k right back on them, than to be giving BCBS that same amount of money every month for them to just keep.
I'm evaluating these plans trying to balance out the fact that K pretty much NEVER uses his insurance except for the head doc and meds, while I have a boob that likes to be a drama queen every couple years and send me in for a biopsy. But I'd like to think I could go seven months without needing surgery... Maybe if I start scheduling my appointments in January and December every other year. That way if it decides to be a bitch two years in a row, I can arrange it so both biopsies fall in the same year. (I've already told me if it bothers me again, I'm evicting it. I'm hoping that scares it into submission. :-p)
Edit: And you know, I could actually understand BCBS raising my rates directly because of these surgeries. But they've specifically told me that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
See what fun you guys in Canada and the UK get to miss? It's like playing the stock market, but with your health and even your life! Awesome, huh?
I was up until about 2:30a going through all of the different health insurance plans BCBS offers. I'd gotten it down from 40+ choices to around six before my brain started refusing to understand math.
If I haven't tortured you guys on here with my rants, due to BCBS recently deciding to randomly raise my rates with no explanation, K and I are now paying $1551 every two months for health insurance. Going through the new plans they offer now, I was half happy to find that I can get us decent insurance for less than a third of that, and half irritated that they don't have ANY plans, not even their "Wow, this covers everything!" plan, that comes anywhere close to being as expensive as ours. WTF?
Of course, I also know the quoted rates are BS because when we got our original policies and paid up-front for the first two months, we received notification about a month later that my rates were going up because apparently they'd just noticed I was a female, and then almost DOUBLING again after that because they decided to nail me with a "pre-existing condition" of migraines that I still haven't been able to get removed despite the fact that they say that "pre-existing conditions" only apply for 48 months, and I haven't had a migraine for about ten years now. (And DON'T get me started on all the people fighting the new healthcare laws that will finally make this illegal.) They made me jump through a million hoops with doctor's notes and medical records, only to finally deny my dispute because I'd been to a chiropractor. Not for migraines. Whose visits they didn't cover anyway. I kept planning to dispute it again, but I felt like such a kicked puppy after that that I just kept ignoring it until this recent rate increase.
The plan I'm looking at has a $5000 deductible. (For those of you in other countries with a much less stupid healthcare system, that means I have to pay the first $5000 toward things like emergency room visits and surgeries before insurance covers the rest. That's mostly a worry for huge things. "Preventative" care, like my yearly doc visits, are free, and other doc visits are between $35-75 on this particular plan.) Our current plan has a $1500 deductible, which is nice if we plan to have bad things happen to us, but otherwise, the $500 or so a month the new plan saves us will make up the difference in about seven months. Fourteen months to cover the deductible difference for both of us. I'd so much rather use that money to pay down my credit cards even if, god-forbid, something does happen and I have to put that $5k right back on them, than to be giving BCBS that same amount of money every month for them to just keep.
I'm evaluating these plans trying to balance out the fact that K pretty much NEVER uses his insurance except for the head doc and meds, while I have a boob that likes to be a drama queen every couple years and send me in for a biopsy. But I'd like to think I could go seven months without needing surgery... Maybe if I start scheduling my appointments in January and December every other year. That way if it decides to be a bitch two years in a row, I can arrange it so both biopsies fall in the same year. (I've already told me if it bothers me again, I'm evicting it. I'm hoping that scares it into submission. :-p)
Edit: And you know, I could actually understand BCBS raising my rates directly because of these surgeries. But they've specifically told me that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
See what fun you guys in Canada and the UK get to miss? It's like playing the stock market, but with your health and even your life! Awesome, huh?