Many of the pundits attacking government health insurance rely on government health insurance for their own families. ~ David Gross

The man has a fabulous point. I’d like to know who among our Congressmen against public healthcare are using the system for their families. And I’d like to trade them for MY insurance company.

One of these days I’m going to scan in all my Explanation of Benefits statements (I could wallpaper my office with them) and work out all the financial aspects of it. Pie charts, breakdowns on what we’ve paid into automatically, co-pays, et cetera. I was going to do it after I’ve had the baby so that we can get a proper financial breakdown for how much it costs an insured person in the lower middle class to have a baby.

I knew it was going to be expensive from the start but I didn’t realize how much our insurance would fight to not pay every step of the way. It’s actually quite astounding.

I really think the true answer to our problem is that as a people, we insured expect a profit driven organization to provide services to us that they say they will, and then get offended when they change their minds because they are more concerned about the bottom line.

They are so slick about it too, writing things out in legalese that even their customer service representatives can’t translate into an understandable answer. Like how my medical insurance can’t tell me whether a doula is covered because the way the wording in their documentation is doesn’t specify whether a doctor authorized doula will be paid for services or whether the doctor has to be in the room supervising the doula the entire time to pay for the services. They don’t know. Seriously. I was given that as an answer.

I can’t wait until I can build up a savings nest egg and cancel this fucking medical insurance. Think about it, in twelve months having paid in $360 a month you’ll have $4320 at your disposal. Put that into a moderate savings account with interest and let it develop. In five years you have $21,600 sitting there, without interest mind you, waiting to help whenever you need to visit the doctor.

The main problem is that doctors and hospitals mark up their services so that when the insurance companies get their discounts, they are still able to make a profit. I can’t really fault them this seeing as how we do it at work whenever we do a warranty company job. We automatically add on money because we know they’ll knock some back off.

The problem is that this mark up hits those people without insurance and it knocks them down. That’s about the only reason I have any respect for our medical insurance, because it knocks off our price and I know that had we no insurance, we’d be paying much more for the services.

We wonder why this system is screwed up? Just look at it. It’s a mess.

I’m at a loss as to how to fix it but I can see where it’s broken.