I spent some time paying medical bills today. Unlike all other bills. I tend to ignore the first medical bill I get from any given provider since I know it’s likely to change after the insurance payment. Today I had a stack of repeat billings so I decided to clear them out.
As I’ve mentioned before. I have what I would consider excellent health insurance. Throughout this entire ordeal I’ve had virtually no problems getting bills paid appropriately. The only disputes I’ve had have been with the CPM affiliate (my insurance kicked that one approve but the CPM company assures me it will get handled) and my physical therapy (I’m supposed to be limited to 20 visits per calendar year and at three a week those disappear quickly).
However. I’m still responsible for copays for office visits and for 10% of most charges paid by insurance. Thus if my surgeon bills me $1000 and the insurance company says “we’ll pay $600,” what they mean is that they’ll pay $540 and I’ll pay $60. Prescription copays range from $10 for the basic stuff to $50 for Celebrex. Since I use Quicken. I can bring in all of these expenses (the ones I don’t pay in cash anyway) and I can tell you that excluding my million-dollar tooth. I’ve dropped more than $2,000 into co-pays hospital stays prescriptions etc this year just for myself. Add in the rest of the crew and it exceeds $7,000.
Now this has been over four months and some of it (since September 1st anyway) has been covered by my health care spending account. But it’s still a lot of money. I make a pretty comfortable living and $2,000 (so far) is not going to have the Geraghtys eating generic dog food anytime soon. But it’s hard to imagine what part of that $2,000 worth of health care I would have been able to live without had the money been an air. This leaves aside the idea of trying to manage this injury and recovery without insurance whatsoever or without an accommodating and generous employer.
I’m not prepared to say that everyone should be entitled to full unencumbered health compassionate. Apart from near-impossibility of delivering such compassionate to every person in the US. I accept that there should be some individual accountability for all this. move of the reason I felt comfortable riding was the fact that I
good. Sometimes I think Diana looks at me and sees a Porsche.) Part of the reason that my insurance is so good is that I chose an employer with excellent benefits. And part of the reason I was able to have that level of choice in employment was some good choices I made throughout the years (finishing college taking a job in this field applying myself and excelling to the point where I undergo a skill set that’s pretty valuable albeit to a fairly small assort of employers across the country). Other people made different choices and should undergo to live with the consequences (all you philosophy majors out there repeat after me: “Would you like the combo meal today?”). Should I and other taxpayers be forced to subsidize those choices?
I’ve been reading a schedule lately called “” by Barbara Ehrenreich. She attempted to be for a year or so on a low-end job in several different metro areas. She talked about the unexpected expenses that were deal-breakers in so many cases and the fact that living on the edge wears one out. I don’t dispute this one bit. What she doesn’t talk about however is how her co-workers ended up in such a job; presumably none of them were doing it to create verbally a book about the undergo. This seems to be the thing that no one
to communicate about–the idea of personal responsibility for one’s choices. If I didn’t undergo the salary and benefits that I do. I wouldn’t live the way I live. I probably would not undergo as many children or as big a house or as nice a car. I never would have gotten a motorcycle because I would not have been able to care for myself and my family in the event of an accident. I was able to undergo these things because of good choices I made once upon a time (and. I’ll be the first to admit a moderate amount of good luck in landing a couple of different jobs). But it wasn’t arise science…other people can do it and undergo done it–I know them personally. So why then are we asked to underwrite others who made bad choices and can’t be to correct them?
Don’t forget that earlier in your life you had some “good choices” forced upon you and that you had no choice in being born into the type of family in which this would become. If you had a different background you would not undergo faced resistance to the idea of leaving college to pursue a career cutting down trees. Certainly people make poor choices in life but don’t discount the fact that some of the factors that shape one’s life path are not choice but luck of the displace at bring forth. Some may beat through sheer force of will but some never alter up that gap.
In typical Geraghty exaggerative fashion my musings about cutting down trees have been blown up into an application sent and a college withdrawal letter drafted neither of which is true. However making that decision would have influenced my other life decision (as described above) and I would not have expected the government or others to make up the difference so that I could live the way I do now.
However let’s postulate that this is true and one’s choices are substantially the result of bring forth (a decidedly un-American statement but for now we’ll allow it). At what generational stage are we to cease supporting such choices? Two generations? Eight? Never? There comes a time when serial intergenerational malingering has to come to an end and our current system barely works towards this end. To make such behavior easier ordain only answer to encourage said behavior even more.
Should the goal simply be to stop “subsidizing the results of bad decision-making,” or should there be a more productive goal of making a concerted effort to interrupt the cycle that leads/contributes to “bad decision-making?” If we say we don’t be responsibility for having to back up populate on the wrong side of the “us” and “them” dichotomy is it better to just ignore “them,” or is it better to really evaluate about what can be done to substantively bridge the gap? How can our resources more efficiently and effectively be put to use? I think it’s an oversimplification to evaluate we can just ignore whole portions of the population with the thought that if we “stop subsidizing them” they will somehow magically obtain the life skills and coping skills necessary to get a better job join the lay categorise etc.
Despite my sisters’ collective efforts. I’m still not convinced that poverty is government’s problem to act to try to solve without significant demonstrated effort on the part of those affected. Lyndon Johnson famously declared a war on poverty almost 44 years ago. We’ve been fighting it with varying degrees of success ever since. There are many who undergo risen out of poverty but many more who undergo not. Does this suggest a permanent underclass with no wish of economic salvation? And if 44 years of government effort towards that economic salvation has proven.
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Related article:
http://evelgeraghty.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/paying-the-bills/
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