I’ve never bought health insurance before.
While it certainly may work better for some than others, my experience in the world of healthcare has often shown me that it’s often not worth it.
Let’s first start at the pricing basics. A quick search of any healthcare plan cost will provide the option of a cheaper plan with a higher deductible and a premium plan with a lower deductible. In either scenario, you’re looking at a home out-of-pocket cost that won’t be easy to pay.
Take it from Jack’s situation alone. With the cheaper plan, he’d have to fork over $25,000. On the premium plan, that amount is lowered to $21,000, which isn’t much of an improvement.
An ordinary family in good health usually can’t pay over that much, nor will they possibly ever need to. Take a moment to think about how often you need to go to the hospital alone. If you end up never using your insurance, that’s several thousand dollars down the drain.
In my opinion, insurance is a little bit of a scam. In recent years, healthcare costs have inflated dramatically more than what they’re really worth. A $40,000 procedure may only really be worth $10,000. The rest of the profit not only goes to the hospital, but to the middleman that tries to make as much money as possible. If you have insurance on hand, they’ll tend to jack up the price without any clear transparency. Adding in the government tends to only produce more inefficiencies without any real reduction in healthcare costs.
In terms of real usage, we can always rely on a good homeownership comparison. If your lights suddenly go out, do you call insurance? If your fan blows out, is that when you call insurance? Chances are, you’ll go and call maintenance instead. So why are we expecting insurance companies to pay for these little checkups that we have?
Fixing healthcare
We’ve found that there are two things that can dramatically improve America’s healthcare system. Firstly, people need to start buying policies that make sense and not just buy a certain one because it’s what everyone else does. Secondly, hospitals need to become far more transparent in their costs.
Jack and I actually conducted an experiment to see how transparent our local hospitals would be in providing the costs of having a baby. Out of the five hospitals we called, only two of them provided pricing. Yet, those two places still weren’t clear on their costs and sent us to a bunch of different places.
Your healthcare solution
Though we’re not financial advisors, we recommend that if you’re young and healthy, try out a health savings account that you can put that monthly payment into instead of paying for insurance.
Instead of letting a premium monthly payment go to waste, the money you set aside for a health savings account would be pre-taxed and let you borrow against it. You’d also have far more agency when crafting your own payment plan for any medical procedure you do have.
Finally, instead of waiting for an accident to happen, it’s always best to visit the hospital early. The costs of those little checkups will usually always be cheaper than a huge medical procedure in the end.
And that’s it for this week’s blog about our take on healthcare insurance! For more tips on how you can become a comprehensive and money-conscious homeowner, don’t hesitate to sign up for our newsletter today! Here at Tom’s Texas Realty, we look forward to helping you with all your realty needs.
