I know I say this every August, but it bears repeating: it is fucking criminal that a teacher, a state employee, would be expected to pay half their monthly salary for family health care, not including dental and vision services.
But wait, you say. Don’t you qualify for subsidized care for your kids?
Well of course we do. I pay a premium for that, and my three kids are covered by three different HMOs because their ages and Hannah’s single parent status put them under different programs. At last count, we’ve been removed from three family practices who have stopped accepting our insurance. Urgent care does not accept our insurance. Our insurance declined to pay for Hannah’s medications, so we pay for those out of pocket. If we were dissatisfied for any reason with the service at this clinic, we would have no options. None. She’s required to get care in her county, so we couldn’t go to the next larger town over to their public mental health clinic either.
Forget about ALL that. Pretend we love my childrens’ state subsidized care. Pretend it’s just my husband and me on the plan. Now we’re all the way down to 663.88 for the least expensive monthly premium, which if you’re playing along at home is just shy of 25% of our monthly take home. Under this plan, our in network co-pay is $20 and our specialist co-pay is just 20% after we meet the $500 deductible. For my mental health care, a similar plan: After we meet the $500 deductible, I’d pay 20% to the doc. At our public mental health center where I go now on a welfare grant, I’d pay a 30.00 co pay for every visit. Right now, I’m there 4x a month or so.
But wait- there’s more. My medication would not be covered by this insurance. Just FYI, the out of pocket price for one of my medications is around $600 a month.
To recap: for the two adults in our house we’d be paying:
366.00 a month premium
120.00 mental health (oh I should mention I’m limited on the amount of visits per year)
100.00 medications (let’s pretend my medications are on the non-preferred list and won’t be flatly denied coverage like Hannah’s)
$580.00 monthly if neither of us got sick ever.
I think I’ll stop here short of spreading out routine dental and vision care over the year. After all we don’t need eyes or teeth to function as workers, correct?
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