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The price of a COBRA plan depends on the amount your employer is currently paying for your coverage. If your plan costs $1,000/month and your premium is $100/month, then your employer is paying $900/month. When you go on COBRA, you are responsible for paying the full monthly amount ($1,000) plus a 2% administrative fee ($20) for a total of $1,200.
The cost of employer-provided coverage varies widely depending on the size of the company, the demographic make-up of the workforce, and the claims history of the group.
I wish more people knew how much their employers pay for their coverage.
just a typo - the total amount would be $1,020, not $1,200
I think a Medicare buy-in option is a great idea. If the ACA is repealed, older people with preexisting conditions will be unable to buy coverage at any cost, just like in the bad old days before the ACA. If something happens to my current job, there's a 0% chance of my finding a new job with healthcare benefits. Buying into Medicare is certainly better than being uninsured.
I'm not sure about Medicare for all, but I think it's high time we stopped getting our health insurance through our employers like the rest of the world. If we want to keep the for-profit aspect, why aren't we all buying our policies on the open market?
Health insurance is part of our compensation packages. If employer-subsidized insurance is discontinued, who thinks they would get a commensurate increase in their pay?
I'm a left-leaning centrist Independent but am totally against Medicare for All; and a Medicare Buy-In would need to have many more details clarified before I'd ever be on board with it.
What I'm afraid of is overall premium-creep, i.e., if either option were structured in a way so as to make it attractive at first but then when they start losing too much money the program will become more and more expensive (premiums and deductibles) for everyone across the board -- and of course the over-65s typically can afford such hikes the least. Either that or they will start cutting back on what Medicare will pay for, or the percentage. Maybe ultimately both. Bad news for us seniors any way you look at it, IMHO.
There is no way that Medicare can be structured to include all in the Medicare For All plans.
It would be no more Medicare for anyone and something totally new would be put in place.
They didn’t do such a great job the last time they attempted to put Medical Insurance in place.
10 years later and it’s still not working and in Courts.
The safety net misses many who do indeed work but are either self-employed or work for employers who don't provide coverage. They must cover their own health care nut regardless of their income, and are often overwhelmed by the high cost of insurance. ACA was supposed to address this.
No, it wasn't. We consume far too much health care in this country. On average, and across the nation, we consume north of $10,000 per person per year in health care - that's $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Therefore, as surely as night follows day, the insurance to cover that $10,000 average health care utilization must cost at least $10,000 plus overhead & profit.
There are several components of health insurance premiums, including:
Costs of paying for the underlying thing being covered (health care) - at least $10,000 per year per person
Administrative costs
Taxes
Regulatory fees
Compliance costs
Reporting costs
Regulated profit margin (regulated under ACA)
etc
ACA was designed to attempt to reduce the quantity of health care consumed by implementing very large deductibles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pcflezflng
The health care debate in this country is focused too much on how to achieve universal coverage while completely ignoring the reality that the cost of health care in this country, no matter how it's paid for, is exorbitant and way out of line.
A-MEN. But that is still just a symptom - the question is what is the root cause? WHY is health care pricing so exorbitant and way out of line?
Unfortunately as long as we have for profit insurance companies as middle men nothing will change and I don’t see that changing anytime soon
For-profit insurance companies are not the problem.
Some people call for an elimination of for-profit entities involved in health insurance and health care delivery, mistakenly believing "non-profit" is a synonym for "lower cost." It isn't. Those people invariably talk about high compensation of for-profit executives, and somehow mistakenly think non-profit entities do not compete in the marketplace for executive talent and somehow pay less.
See for example Kaiser Permanente. http://www.kp.org. Kaiser Permanente is a consortium of both for-profit and not-for-profit integrated health care & health insurance entities with over 21,000 physicians and nearly 210,000 total employees.
But let's just look at the non-profit side.
As of December 31, 2017, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals entities reported a combined $3.8 billion in net income on $72.7 billion in operating revenues.
From its most recent IRS Form 990 for the 2016 calendar year (again, this is for the NON-PROFIT): The data are public information. I'm showing just top employee compensation as reported by the non-profit entity. I'm just including TITLE, NAME, HOURS PER WEEK WORKED, COMPENSATION and OTHER COMPENSATION.
Sooo.... does the following non-profit compensation look low to you? Does Kaiser's non-profit look efficient to you?
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As long as drugs are not included, and they do not lower the premium for the low income, I am pretty sure a BUY in would be the best. Considering it isn't a tremendous amount of money, maybe around $200-$300 a month.
That is far too low to cover the costs of the health care being insured by Medicare, let alone the administrative overhead for the average person in the USA, and of course aging people consume more than the average.
A one-time buy of (65-your age)*$25,000 plus at least $2,000/month is more like it. That's expensive, but then again the only people who should use it are affluent people who have accumulated the assets to retire early.
It’s not the insurance companies, it’s labor costs. Health care jobs are the highest paying sector in the economy. Other than Canada which has to pay to prevent all their workers from moving to the US, US labor costs are double the rest of the first world.
Exactly.
And it isn't just the compensation of each individual person employed in the health care industry and health insurance industry. We employ far too many people in those industries who don't perform any health care. They are paper pushers, adding zero value to society.
Medicare buy-in is a great idea for seniors who are not yet eligible.
The entry age for being considered a senior is 65. By definition, there is no such thing as a senior who is not yet eligible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jjpike
There are so many people like me that have a younger spouse. I can't retire, because her healthcare costs would be extremely expensive through my cobra insurance. I could go on Medicare today,but she can't.
No, it wasn't. We consume far too much health care in this country. On average, and across the nation, we consume north of $10,000 per person per year in health care - that's $10,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. Therefore, as surely as night follows day, the insurance to cover that $10,000 average health care utilization must cost at least $10,000 plus overhead & profit.
Disagree on the first point. That was one of the purposes of ACA. But I do agree on the second - that we consume way too much health care in this country, far more than other industrialized countries.
A-MEN. But that is still just a symptom - the question is what is the root cause? WHY is health care pricing so exorbitant and way out of line?
That was my point. We spend way too much energy arguing over how to distribute the crumbs instead of exposing the root cause to daylight and addressing it.
Last edited by pcflezflng; 01-03-2019 at 12:11 PM..
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