Last night I was at a get together in The Bronx and we all got to talking about healthcare (while watching the Yankees blow the Houston game! FUCKERS!).
Last year I had two visits: One to my doctor, the regular annual checkup, and a thyroid biopsy (malignant polyps, no worries). Mrs. BBB had one visit, the annual checkup. We had one copay, $15 at NYU Hospital. We have Empire Blue Cross.
We don't buy dental or vision insurance. We have had good experiences with the inexpensive students at NYU Dental School so we just pay them. We both had simple cleanings. Mrs. goes to a cheap local Lebanese eye guy in the hood coupled with Warby Parker.
The girls are in college in Georgia and pay their own premiums on in insurance they bought themselves on the Obamacare exchange. They each pay something under $100 per month. They have Humana. My oldest girl had some complications with her birth control that needed sorting out, but even on her hostess at the Joe's Crab Shack wages she managed the copay and the deductible on her plan is a thousand bucks annually. She swiped it and didn't ask us for a penny. My youngest girl had an incident in Savannah that required minor medical attention. Her job at the Panera Bread offers a plan but she buys her own through the exchange because, well, the plans are just significantly better.
Of course we all pay Medicare taxes.
We came around to a ballpark figure of around $30k in healthcare expenses and Medicare taxes for all four of us. We estimated we used, at most $3000-$3500 worth of healthcare at the most, most of that being my biopsy. We don't get Medicare as we are not old enough.
We are absolutely fine with this. This is how its supposed to work. Our family is healthy, we can afford to pay for the care of others. We try to eat well and exercise and so on, but these things are no guarantee for good health. We consider it all luck. Total and complete luck. Lucky folks should pay more for less.
So, when the day comes that something happens and the news is whatever it is, I'm not going to lose my shit over it. Know why? Because when I was healthy, able and willing, I did my part. I overpaid for zero deductible insurance. For just that very day when astronomical medical bad luck falls.
But there are plenty of folks who are quite well off and think they are paying too much despite their good health. In their minds 'if I'm healthy, I shouldn't pay anything!' This is PRECISELY how the Republican mind works and it is their source of their motivation for destroying our healthcare system.