LOL

[oselle]

I've decided that whenever something drives me so insane that I feel like my hair's gonna catch fire and I want to grab a fork and rake it over my face, I'm just gonna say LOL! Because LOL! is just so perfectly, blithely banal and meaningless and these things that drive me crazy are so comical in their own blackly horrifying way that really, what else is there to say?

Today's LOL! is the news that my health insurance premiums are going up to almost $200 a month -- that's $200 a month, deducted automatically from my paycheck. This does not of course cover any of the copayments that I have to shell out every time I see a doctor or fill a prescription. And of course, this is the insurance I have through my employer, so I'm paying far less for it than if I had to buy it on my own. I probably wouldn't even be able to buy into this plan on my own.

Now, my company has just switched to Blue Cross which is owned by parent company Wellpoint, the biggest health insurer in the country. Wellpoint is at the forefront of pouring millions upon millions of dollars into lobbying, advertising and public relations to defeat any chance of national healthcare ever becoming a reality in America. So here's the LOL! part -- my own premiums are funding this. I am literally, literally giving Wellpoint thousands of dollars a year so that they can fight against my interests and against the wellbeing of America as a whole. I am funding this. I am forced to fund this.

LOL!

Comments

Re: hilarious

[oselle.livejournal.com]

i pay premiums and they pay NOTHING...

The fundamental principle of any business is to make money, not spend it. The insurance BUSINESS is not interested in spending money on your wellbeing, they are interested in making money. "For-profit healthcare" is an oxymoron. There cannot be any real healthcare that is profit-driven.

In short, LOL!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Paying for their efforts to defeat public healthcare and don't forget something like 8o% of their expenditures go to pay lawyers whose job it is to find reasons not to pay you for any medical expenses.

God, I'm glad we don't have Blue Cross where I am. Though I try not to even look at what we get deducted for medical so I don't know.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it doesn't matter what insurance you have. They're ALL working together to make sure national healthcare, any sort of public option, never happens. We had Oxford before Blue Cross and Oxford is owned by United Healthcare, which is also leading the charge against healthcare reform. Before Oxford we had Aetna. Same shit. If your company is bigger than mine, which I'm sure it is, then you probably pay less because of the volume discount, and you might have a more generous employer who picks up more of the tab, which I'm sure you do. But it doesn't matter. At the end of the day they're all literally forcing us to pay for their war against us. It's just defies belief. I can't even think of anything else to compare it to.

[tskterata.livejournal.com]

I moved to Canada 11 years ago (yikes!), and one thing I do not miss is US Health Insurance Companies. People who have lived in Canada their whole lives complain about the Canadian Health Care System, and sure it has its problems, but it's so. much. better. than what I had to deal with down there, I can't even.

I'm sorry the bastards are making you pay them to help fuck the country over. I wish I could say I can't believe it, but I can. I hope the system changes for the better soon, and if not, there's always Canada! or Great Britain! or France! or any other civilized country!

[oselle.livejournal.com]

if not, there's always Canada! or Great Britain! or France! or any other civilized country!

If I were 10 years younger I'd already be gone or at least on my way. As it is, I feel pretty stuck.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah--I only meant I was glad we didn't just get a rise in how much we paid. We have Aetna and before that had Cigna and before that was Oxford. They're all dedicated to screwing us.

[ariadnes-string.livejournal.com]

Sheesh--paying more to support a system that will continue to make you pay more. It's perfect--by which I mean perfectly hideous--catch 22.

My worst insurance story is more about my employer, though it reflects the insanity of the system. When my older son was two, I was on fellowship, away from my regular job, for a year. In the middle of the year, with no warning whatsoever, my employer switched insurance companies (as they did often, part of managing costs, though premiums for employees kept getting higher). And the new insurance had NO COVERAGE for us outside the state of Colorado, where the job was (we were in NC for the year). So, if, say, my child had had an ear infection or something, I would have had to pay out of pocket, or fly him back to CO.

It was actually a major reason I left that job--going without insurance while I was away was a risk I might have taken, but not for my child--though times were better then, and moving around more possible.

LOL is good--better than crying

[i-o-r-h-a-e-l.livejournal.com]

$200?? I'd not be eating in a month!

[pearlette.livejournal.com]

Gah. :(

What a monstrous, greedy behemoth is in charge of people's health in America. :(

The NHS is far from perfect, but this is simply gob-smacking.

$200 a month???!!!! ((((hugs Oselle)))

May I quote you, by the way? There's a discussion about US health care on another form which I visit, with some US posters extolling their system and making the usual noises about 'socialised medicine'. I would keep the quote anonymous.

[the0neru.livejournal.com]

The difference in the UK and American health"care" systems came up at work today - The Other American and I contend that the only real benefits (no pun intended) in the American system are (a) better palliative care and (b) quicker treatment/diagnosis if you have a significant injury or illness. For ordinary stuff the NHS is adequate if slow, and to be honest I'd rather have this system where everybody can get basic care.

I had to have BCBS at my last job in the States (our other choices were all HMOs who were notorious for not paying on claims and arguing with you about referrals) and my HALF of the premium was $200 a month five years ago. And that was for just me - I can't imagine what we'd be paying for family coverage for the two of us now.

LOL! is much easier to say than the also-appropriate long string of profanity.

[sixth-queen.livejournal.com]

The US posters are brainwashed wingnuts. Do they tell you that if you don't have health care that you don't "work hard" like they do, and that you should go out and get a job which offers health care? That's the typical script they read from.

Problem is, free market capitalism ONLY works if consumers are allowed to comparison shop, and if you have real competition. We have neither.

How can you comparison shop if you don't know what anything COSTS? You don't know until you have it done and they send a bill. In every other industry, that's not even legal. On top of that, different companies pay different rates for the same service. How can Aetna pay more for hospital stay than Medicare? It's the SAME service.

There is no competition because insurance companies are in collusion to set rates, there are some states with near monopolies, and... you can't choose NOT to have insurance. That's the ultimate competitor for any industry: choosing to buy nobody's product. You can choose to not buy a sofa or a car, but, health care? Health insurance has guaranteed demand. Not exactly a free market, is it.

It surprises me that the health insurance industry is not treated like the utility industry -- there are many parallels like regional monopolies and guaranteed demand. Utilities are heavily regulated, and I think they have capped profits, precisely because the government knows people HAVE to buy electricity and heat. The ONE time the government took the regulations off a utility, Enron promptly went after innocent people in California. Enron shut off the electric plants to limit supply and jack up prices, giggling with glee at the ensuing chaos. They KNEW people would have to pay the high prices. It was criminal, and I don't know why health insurance is any different.

(well I actually do know why. It's called Lobbyist $$$$$$$)

[oselle.livejournal.com]

And keep in mind it's $200 just for the premiums...in other words, just to maintain my coverage. It's an additional $35 to step into any doctor's office, a minimum of $10 for prescriptions (and that's only for generic prescriptions, medications not available as generics can cost anywhere from $40 to God-knows-what...the co-payment on the topical lotion I use for psoriasis is $100, for example), and a wide scale of co-payments for things like emergency care, hospitalizations, MRI scans, etc. So yes, you can definitely quote me, and be sure to tell those Americans the truth about British healthcare, which you should understand we've been led to believe is an absolute catastrophe.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I would have far less problem with healthcare through private insurance if the insurers were, in fact, heavily regulated so that prices could not exceed a certain amount and so that people could not be dropped or disqualified, ever. But that would be socialism, wouldn't it? And we can't have that. The free, capitalist, unregulated market, that's what works best, yes?

But then there is no free market for healthcare...there is no competition, as you said. As a consumer, I don't get to comparison shop -- I take what my employer signs me up for and I'm supposed to consider myself grateful. When I first entered the work force some 20 years ago, there actually was a bit more competition -- most companies offered a selection of different plans, almost always including at least one traditional, or comprehensive, plan along with the usual HMOs. Now even the biggest companies offer only HMOs. When I was offered the position at Conde Nast last year, I was shocked to learn they only had one insurance plan -- an HMO -- and they are a huge company.

Of course, the irony is that the very competition that insurance companies and their backers praise is exactly what they don't want. They absolutely do not want the American people to have real healthcare choices because it would force them to price competitively. So as soon as a public program is suggested, the insurance companies all start shrieking that the competition would drive them right out of business. Suddenly, competition is a very bad thing.

It is a bad thing -- for them. But again I have to wonder why their financial interests are more important than the health of the nation, but I guess I'm just an ignorant librul that way.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

The strange thing is that when people opposed to healthcare reform hear stories like yours, they just kind of shrug their shoulders and often they either imply or say straight out that this was some failing on your part, as if if only you had the "right" job something like this wouldn't happen to you. Twice in the past month I've heard an elected Republican official tell people that all they needed to do to get good insurance was get a better or different job -- one guy told a 62-year- old woman that she "just" needed to go work for a bigger company, as if large corporations are just handing out great jobs to seniors. Another jerk told a caller-in to go work for the federal government if she wanted benefits as good as senators and congressmen have. That's exactly where their heads are at -- it's not the healthcare system that's a failure, it's you.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, my eating is become more no-frills all the time.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

There is no doubt that there is excellent medicine available in the United States, but what does that matter if it is not available to everyone? Even if you do have a "good" plan, like I do, the costs are still punitive and you still live under the constant possibility of being denied treatments, procedures and medications that the insurer won't pay for. The constant, ridiculous refrain I hear is that national healthcare would put "a bureaucrat" in charge of your healthcare but I'd rather have that than some corporate drone who will literally get rewarded for denying care to paying customers.