Betting Against Your Own Health
What is health insurance? A monthly payment that Americans make to ensure that one day, if they ever need it, they’ll be cared for. While it helps to keep your costs down when visiting the doctor once or twice a year (or decade if you’ve yet to have children and are under 40) and will help knock the price of that $100 prescription you occasionally need down to $12.
However, so many Americans don’t even have enough insurance to cover them when it really comes to crunch time: when the cancer shows up. So the $50, $100, $600 / month that they’ve been paying every month are all for naught. Consider how often you actually need to use your health insurance vs. how much it costs you to have it. And don’t be fooled into thinking that since your company pays for your health insurance you aren’t: if Company A has to pay $150 / month to keep your ass insured, that’s $150 / month they won’t be paying you directly.
When you purchase health insurance you are, in essence, betting that you will get sick one day. Horribly sick.
Now consider this other reality: the very fact that we need insurance. There is a product that apparently every American needs which is so expensive that we can’t even afford it without making monthly payments towards it our entire lives. Monthly payments which will increase over time as we have children, get married, and get older, in no particular order. Every year you don’t get sick, you’re actually lowering the big pay off that you hope to get.
You’re making a monthly installment on a bill you don’t even have yet, but are essentially hoping to have. You’re paying toward your own bad luck.
Wouldn’t it be better then to save that money, particularly for those paying $300, $400, etc., and earn interest on it. According to this quick interest calculator I just used, if you save $100 / month for 10 years at 3% interest, you’ll have almost $29,000 at the end of that 10 years. If you don’t get sick, now you’ve got $29k to blow on your midlife crisis!
If you feel the same, you may be interested in doing something about it, like signing this petition.