DramaCare
Being self-employed, a lot of us artists go without health insurance. No doubt this bohemian lifestyle breeds in us a belief in our own invincibility. That, or our enlarged egos refuse to harbor doubts about prolonged longevity. Personally I think of insurance, any insurance, as the bane of my existence, basically an extortion scheme by private enterprise to shake me down through fear and intimidation. We got car insurance, we got house insurance, I got business insurance and yeah, we pay through the ring in our nose for what we’ll euphemistically call health insurance.
We got a ‘catastrophic’ plan. Meaning the insurer won’t cover anything short of a catastrophe. Huge deductible. No need for co-pay. Fat chance they’d cover anything this side of cremation. For only $9000 a year. Half my life I didn’t make $9000 a year. At least that’s what the Social Security folks tell me in calculating my projected retirement. I think they just like to rub it in ….
So naturally the mizzus and me were real interested in the opening of ObamaCare. The U.S. government shut down over yet another last ditch effort to kill it, cripple it or hamstring it. Some folks in Congress are in the final throes of apoplectic desperation. Gonna cost jobs, gonna cost a fortune, not gonna save me a dime and maybe way worse. I didn’t know WHAT we’d find but I figured it wouldn’t be worse than what we had now.
I was right. It wasn’t worse. It was vastly better. We don’t have to buy ‘catastrophic’ anymore. We won’t get the Cadillac hedge fund manager program, but we won’t get the cheapest ones either, just something in the middle. You maybe are wondering what it costs, bottom line. We were too. Try about $1500 a year after deductions for income. Sort of progressive health insurance, not regressive. You heard correcto. $1500 vs $9000. And, by the way, that ‘catastrophic’ plan. It would cost us zero, zip, nada. Nothing.
Now … I know this is anecdotal stuff, one household, maybe atypical. The TeaParty folks who think once we’ve tasted this candy, we’ll be so addicted, they’ll never be able to get rid of it — well, correcto again!! They can call it ObamaCare or DramaCare or whatever. For us it’s Affordable Health Care. The only thing that would make me more pleased is if the insurance company gave us back what we’ve obviously been overpaying all these years. But, let’s not kid ourselves. Folks can call this socialism or communism, but I bet in Russia the insurance companies aren’t still making big profits like they are here. Just a guess….
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