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Hmm, counting the insurance premiums 100% towards the birth of the child is a bit misleading. Presumably, you'd be paying those even if you didn't have the chil
by losvedir 11mo ago
Hmm, counting the insurance premiums 100% towards the birth of the child is a bit misleading. Presumably, you'd be paying those even if you didn't have the child. That said, the cost of health insurance for a family is pretty outrageous. My premiums are along the same lines as the ones here (although less noticeable since they're paid by my employer).
- Aaronontheweb 11mo agoI only keep this plan because we're planning on having children, so yes, it's included in the pricing decision.
- evanelias 11mo agoThat doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying your health insurance premiums would be $0 if you weren't planning on having children?
- Aaronontheweb 11mo agoDid you try reading the lengthy section of the article where I answered your question?
- evanelias 11mo agoI skimmed your 2400-word article a second time just now, and I still don't understand why your math is allocating 100% of your family's health insurance premiums to childbirth. And now I additionally don't understand your abrasive tone in answering this fairly straightforward question. Multiple commenters are raising this point, so perhaps you should consider that you aren't conveying this information well?
- Aaronontheweb 11mo ago1. I mentioned, in multiple places, that this is the cheapest PPO offered to me through a limited selection of potential brokers / marketplaces - and that's important because it covers our current health care providers AND child birth as a benefit. 2. If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Individual marketplace plans become a viable, for instance, since the "not covering childbirth" issue goes away. I mention the short-comings of the individual health insurance marketplace at least twice in this regard, including a big pull quote explaining the ACA work-around with child birth coverage.
- evanelias 11mo ago> If we weren't trying to have kids, our options for purchasing health insurance expand drastically. Yes, but crucially none of those expanded options cost $0, so I still don't understand your math at all. I feel like we're talking in circles here. You should be deducting a substantially non-zero number from the amount in the headline to account for your "normal" non-childbirth-year best-case medical insurance premiums (or out-of-pocket cash costs if foregoing insurance altogether).
- losvedir 11mo agoWhat exactly does covering childbirth mean? We've had two children now and it's not something I've considered when choosing insurance (my company's vs my wife's), so maybe we just got lucky. Is there anything different about child birth vs simply in-network hospital coverage? I assumed we'd just hit our out-of-pocket max.
- anon7000 11mo agoAbove comment is discussing choosing via marketplace, which indicates it might not be an employer funded plan. (Which are gonna be better)
- staticman2 11mo agoYou are spreading misinformation when you say ACA doesn't cover childbirth. If this was true it would be plastered in every newspaper for the last 15 years.
- mhb 11mo agoAlso not a big impact on the message, but $200/mo for a phone is a bit disingenuous.
- estimator7292 11mo agoI pay about that much for a family of 2.
- mhb 11mo agoI pay $127/mo for a family of 4. $800 for 4 refurb iphones amortized over ~5 years so add another $15/mo.
- aliceryhl 11mo agoHow?
- phil21 11mo agoVerizon unlimited plans will be about that after taxes and fees for two lines. Add in phones being financed and you’re easily over $200/mo direct with a carrier.
- toast0 11mo agoClaiming $200/month for a phone makes one wonder which numbers are valid. I'm not saying everyone needs to make a $100 phone last 5 years and use a $15/month plan, but I'm not even sure how I would get to $200/month in phone bill, even including financing an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
- Aaronontheweb 11mo agoI pay that at least much for my family, hence why I used it
- ianferrel 11mo agoHow many phones do you get for that? My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the cost.
- CommenterPerson 11mo agoHad the same reaction when I saw how the 40K was calculated (BTW I strongly believe in Medicare for all to control costs and to pay for civilization. To be paid out of progressive taxes on all income). If Aaronontheweb had the misfortune of getting seriously sick, required surgery .. he would pay $7,150 for something that could easily cost $100K+++. Saying he's paying premiums just for having a baby really feels like weaselly logic .. so he thinks he or the rest of his family will absolutely never fall sick? What if a cancer diagnosis hits one of you out of the blue (I hope it doesn't, but that's what insurance is for).
- gishh 11mo agoWhich bits cost 100k? The $75 ibproufen? The $47 towel? The $19,563 bed charge? Oh, the $32,925 imaging that NFL players get instantly? Insurance in America is a fucking joke.
- CommenterPerson 11mo agoThe charges you mention are likely all from hospitals. How about Pluvicto for advanced prostate cancer at $42,500 per monthly dose? All the players are in on it. The sound way to manage costs and avoid these games is via Medicare for all, with premiums paid by progressive rate taxation of income. Maybe even wealth beyond a very large amount.
- tptacek 11mo agoCurrently insured Americans would likely be worse off under any plausible M4A plan.
- GeoAtreides 11mo agoShow your work, please
- hellotomyrars 11mo agoBased on what? Why even leave this comment if you’re just going to say “would likely be worse off” without giving literally any evidence or even suggestion of why. Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that. Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between you and the care you actually receive. Cut out several layers of middlemen and the costs go down. God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars. I had pretty good marketplace insurance this year but the plan I’m on now isn’t even offered anymore and if I got the next closest offered plan I’d be paying 6X as much for the premiums with higher copays on top. I’ll be switching to my union offered plan instead which is much better than the new marketplace plan but still worse than the marketplace insurance I had before.
- BeetleB 11mo ago> Hmm, counting the insurance premiums 100% towards the birth of the child is a bit misleading. I see your point, but do you not think that if you're a family of 4, having to pay $40K before insurance kicks in is ridiculously expensive, and out of reach for most Americans? I'd wager that most self employed folks in the US almost never benefit from insurance (except for things covered by Obamacare which come nowhere near justifying the premiums). The deductibles can be so high that you're pretty much always paying out of pocket.
- avgDev 11mo agoThe problem is the healthcare cost is insane. You will go through $40k after a good injury that may need a major surgery or few smaller surgeries. Average cost for hip replacement is $40k. I've had a sports hernia and the bill was about $30k.
- BeetleB 11mo ago> I've had a sports hernia and the bill was about $30k. And what the OP is pointing out is that if your injury is $30K, insurance covers nothing, because the premium + deductible is $40K.
- bonsai_spool 11mo ago> And what the OP is pointing out is that if your injury is $30K, insurance covers nothing, because the premium + deductible is $40K. The point of insurance is to mitigate risk. If you think you have enough money to cover your risk, there's no reason to buy insurance. The sleight of hand here is first complaining that you did not incur enough hazards to offset the risk premium and then citing this as a reason the risk premiums should not exist. Where is the story of the family being weighed down by bills? Or of not getting physical therapy after an injury and having permanent, income-reducing disabilities?
- BeetleB 11mo ago> The point of insurance is to mitigate risk. Agreed - both to you and to society. What's under debate is "how much risk." For most people in the US, they'll need help before they hit $40K. They can't afford paying $40K every year for medical and medical related expenses.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoWhy do you need to get insurance for your child to be born anyway? Isn't the hospital already insured? Isn't that kind of janky?
- maxerickson 11mo agoBirth injuries are insured by the ob/gyn, which is part of the very high cost of delivering a baby in the US (because such injuries often lead to a lot of care).
- kirth_gersen 11mo agoIn America, you basically need insurance to act as a larger stronger party in the negotiation of prices with the hospital on your behalf. Without the bargaining power of the insurance company the prices you'd pay can be significantly inflated. So paying for the insurance is the slightly lesser of two evils. Supposedly. From your question it seems perhaps you live somewhere with a saner system in place. I'm envious.
- dan353hehe 11mo agoI’ve been told that too. But I’ve done self pay for the last year, and every time I go to the hospital they instantly give me a 30% discount. That makes me think they are artificially inflating prices so that when the insurance company negotiats their discount, well, it might be the same as what I pay
- thatfrenchguy 11mo agoI think OP here is just keeping a completely dominated plan (and his health insurance company knows it). He has less than 50 employees, he is not required to offer health insurance to his employees and he should go on the ACA market. Given he has 3 children, 400% of FPL in 2026 is $150,600 so he's easily eligible for ACA subsidies (which, by the way, in 2021-2026, were available to everyone) by tweaking his income (easy to do when you have a company). He also says uninformed things like: > My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those. The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA. > HMOs or EPOs that have some issues with them: coinsurance What matters at the end of the day when you have a child is your maximum out of pocket (which you will 100% hit the year you have a child!). Whether you have copays or coinsurance after a deductible does not matter here. The ACA caps your maximum out of pocket at $18,400 no matter what (which, yes, is too high), so what you need to optimize for is premium + OOP for the providers that you care about. Like, I get it, it's America, for healthcare like many other things (student loans, credit card debt, ...) it's easy to end up in a bad situation, but at some point you have to spend time understanding the game.
- Aaronontheweb 11mo ago> Given he has 3 children, 400% of FPL in 2026 is $150,600 so he's easily eligible for ACA subsidies I am absolutely not eligible. I earn more than $150k. And "manipulating your income" is not really feasible with a pass-through entity. > The premiums have nothing to do with the plans. Every single plan on the marketplace has to cover child-birth, that's sort of the point of the ACA. As I mention in the piece, I check every year. I have no idea what subsidized plans include, but the other marketplace plans definitely do not include child birth. I explicitly address this point: > The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) barred insurers from turning down applicants based on existing pre-conditions; the way insurers get around this for pregnancy and child-birth is not by rejecting pregnant applicants (illegal), but by simply refusing to cover the care those applicants need to survive pregnancy (legal and common.) and > My wife and I are healthy, but we’re building our family and I have yet to see a marketplace plan that supports child-birth. Maybe the subsidized ones do, but I earn too much money to see those. All of the ones I’ve found through eHealth Insurance or Healthcare.gov never cover it - and I check every year. Love the over-confidence though. The best outcome for me in even writing this article would be to get some internet commenter pissed off enough to find me a cheaper version of my plan. That would solve my problem immediately!
- jhorsager 11mo ago"Less noticeable" are the keywords. Premiums are not paid by employers. They are paid by employees from what would otherwise be part of their salary.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]