I was wasting time expanding my horizons this evening on Twitter, and I came across this tweet.
“@Binkley Not to mention insurance premium increases. Between health, dental, vision, and short-term dis. I’m losing $20/check this year.”
Oh my.
Most people get paid every two weeks. So $20 out of each check would amount to $520 for a year’s worth of dental, vision, and health insurance, along with short term disability. This is one of the reasons why I think that it’s so hard to get a constructive dialog going on health insurance reform. In our experience with selling health insurance in Colorado, we’ve found that people who pay just a small fraction of the price of their benefits rarely know how much the coverage actually costs. COBRA paperwork often comes as a very unwelcome surprise. People who buy their own individual health insurance are obviously aware – usually painfully so – of how much the coverage costs. And people with employers who pay for employee coverage but not dependent coverage have a good idea of how much group health insurance actually costs (assuming they have dependents).
We work in the individual health insurance market; our family pays for our own $5000 deductible health insurance policy, and funds our own HSA. Sometimes we need to be reminded that there are a huge number of Americans who are not aware of the actual cost of health insurance or health care. To us, health care reform that lowers costs across the board is a very important issue. But with such huge discrepancies in what people are paying for their health insurance, it’s hard to get everybody on the same page. We’re not even in the same book yet, say nothing of on the same page.
