[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Just last week I received my Anthem Blue Cross insurance renewal forms in the mail.
The news isn’t good.
By adding a new baby to my plan, the already astronomical rates skyrocketed.
Combine that with a healthy double-digit percentage increase in premiums, and it all looks rather bleak. Like the rest of the intensely self-involved of our generation, I decided to update my Facebook status with my thought of the moment – that before I’m “mandated” to buy coverage, I’m going to drop my health insurance – and go naked.
Surprisingly, this elicited a number of alarmist comments from friends and family who wondered how a pregnant woman and soon-to-be new mother could neglect to carry health insurance. The fear mongering was rampant. How would I pay for those so-called “well-baby” visits? Who would pay for the cost of birth? What would I do if my child contracted a life threatening disease like leukemia?
These were not the most persuasive arguments during a period when I’m fed up with health insurance and, more generally, Western medicine. The profit motive of the American “health care” industry causes it to focus too much on screening and treatment, rather than prevention and cures.
Why I Am Staying Home
What I didn’t post on my Facebook page is that I’m paying out-of-pocket for my midwife and home birth because Blue Cross considers birth in a hospital, at four times the cost, medically necessary, while my cheaper home birth is supposedly not. I didn’t post that when I called various doctors’ offices (of the doctors I’d like to have, not the ones I’m mandated to choose from in my “plan”), I found out that doctor visits will generally run me a couple of hundred dollars per visit. Meaning, I could see them three or four times a month and not begin to touch the cost of insurance. And I’m not one to run to the doctor to begin with.
I didn’t post the results of my research on the proliferation of well-baby visits that have parents running to the doctor several times a year so their children can be screened, measured, and vaccinated ad nauseum (literally). These visits, not so coincidentally, lead to more treatment, driving up the profits for health professionals and the cost of insurance.
I can remember dozens of times in the last few years that my friends have been obsessed with where their children fell in percentile rankings (he’s too small, too short, too tall). They have subjected their children to bizarre apparatus (that thing that will make one’s head round – after, of course it flattens due to the doctor’s recommendation that the child sleep only on one’s back) or doctors consigning them to a future of human growth hormones.
My sister-in-law even called my mother-in-law to rat us out. More alarm ensued. Then my husband gave her the gory details. Our options for “full” coverage run from a $1271 per month HMO plan that denies coverage for everything (yes, I’m appealing), to a $1981 PPO plan that requires I pay $5000 out of pocket before the insurance company pays the first dollar. Believe it or not, after hearing this, my in-laws were shocked.
I Am Betting on Me
Surely, they pressed, there must be some cheaper coverage out there. Not for the self-employed. Didn’t they see “Sicko?” Are most Americans unaware of the underlying reasons for the current health care debate? Health insurance premiums are astronomical. Health care itself is very overpriced. And just because the cost is “hidden” from most Americans by their employers doesn’t mean we all aren’t paying the price.
My husband patiently explained that the bottom line of all the plans available to us healthy folk with no pre-existing conditions is that someone will pay about $15,000 to $20,000 a year, and bet on you not getting sick so the profits can be pocketed.
I’m comfortable with the decision to live without coverage. I remember being uninsured for a year after law school. I had no job, no job prospects, and no employed and insured husband to get me covered. My total health care costs for that year, a whopping $600. And if I hadn’t gone to the local emergency room for a routine bacterial infection, I could probably have saved a load of money.
And now, I’m supposed to pay $23,772 in case I get sick? In case my soon-to-be born child gets sick? I’d much rather pocket the cash. I’m far too stingy to pay my hard-earned cash to a greedy industry or to subsidize people who eat McDonald’s for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice-cream for dinner. In four years when health insurance is likely to be mandated, I’ll have nearly $100,000 banked and ready to go. And I’ll need it, because the latest figures from the White House don’t promise reductions in health insurance cost, but merely a 1 percent increase per year. Even if I believe that prediction, I’ll need that money in 2013.
And as I informed my in-laws, there’s no reason to worry about me. I’ll find some kind of catastrophic coverage to pick up the slack should I be in a car accident or get cancer. In the interim, I’ll bet on me.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
