McSurance - Crap health coverage wins a regulatory victory.

[Klukie]

How's this for a deal: You pay me $13.09 a week. In exchange, I will pay your medical bills, but only up to $2,000 a year. Maybe that deal makes sense if you know with absolute certainty that your medical expenses in the coming year will fall between $680.68 ($13.09 each week for 52 weeks) and $2,000. It makes no sense at all if there's the slightest chance you might end up in the hospital. True, if your hospital expenses exceed $2,000 you'll have lowered the bill by about $1,300. But $1,300 won't likely cover even the cost of an ambulance, much less anything that happens after you arrive. You'd be better off using that $13.09 to buy yourself a weekly lottery ticket.

What I'm describing is an actual health insurance policy. Its technical name is "mini-med plan," but more commonly it goes by the term "crap health insurance." The specific plan described here is what McDonald's offers unmarried new recruits, and the Health and Human Services department just granted it a temporary waiver. McDonald's also offers slightly more generous plans at slightly higher cost: $24 per week for a policy with a $5,000 ceiling and $32 per week for a policy with a $10,000 ceiling.

Health care reform is all about replacing such bait-and-switch schemes with real health insurance. That should indeed happen in 2014, when state health insurance exchanges start selling federally subsidized policies offering a minimum standard of coverage that will not permit (for example) putting a $2,000 ceiling on payouts.

http://www.slate.com/id/2275877/

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[FreakinDJ]

2. It goes by the name "Bankruptcy Policy"

$2000 cap insurance policies merely place a heavier burden on those of us with REAL insurance policies in the form of "Unreinbused Medical Expenses"

Which by the way Hospitals have won the legal right to "Over Charge" the remaining full paying patients to recoup some of these losses. So basically McDonalds Corp gets a warm fuzzy, a Tax Right Off, and you and me get the bill in the form of increased premiums

[NNN0LHI]

3. The day I hired into Ford my entire family were covered 100% with no maximums

But Americans didn't like having those kinds of jobs here so we shipped them somewhere else.

Now the good jobs for our kids are at Walmart and McDonald's. Or the army.

Smart move.

Don

[raccoon]

4. Those days are gone with the wind. But I guess we all know that. nt