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While I do agree with you, we need to back away from taling about the million dollar hospital bill. We used to have a $1M lifetime cap on our life insurance. I

by paul_f 13y ago

While I do agree with you, we need to back away from taling about the million dollar hospital bill. We used to have a $1M lifetime cap on our life insurance. I asked HR how often that happened. Apparently not once, by anyone in the entire history of the University System of Georgia. Sure, it MIGHT happen, but it seems it is exceedingly rare. Am hoping others with more facts than I could comment.

mikeash 13y ago
I assume you meant health insurance, not life insurance. It doesn't make much sense to me that hitting the limits would be so rare. Why have the limits in the first place if that's the case? If they didn't make a difference, then they'd just be bad propaganda for the insurer. This random web page I looked up indicates that about 20,000 people are impacted by lifetime limits: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/healthcare/publications/lifetime-limits-impact.jhtml http://www.pwc.com/us/en/healthcare/publications/lifetime-li... This is not a huge number, but it's not completely irrelevant either. The pool it draws from will exclude the elderly, the study only looks at the people with employer-provided health insurance, and the 20,000 is from the 55% of those who have lifetime limits. The Census Bureau says that about 170 million people have employer-provided health insurance: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf So we get about 93.5 million with employer-provided insurance with lifetime caps, and that in turn gives about a 0.02% chance of hitting a cap. Whether that qualifies as "exceedingly rare", I'm not sure. In any case, "$100,000 hospital bill" is probably a decent substitute for most people, although the odds of being bankrupted by that are probably considerably lower among the HN readership, at least.
smm2000 13y ago
I know one guy who got more than 1 million in bills at Microsoft. Long term cancer does that to you.

by paul_f 13y ago

mikeash 13y ago

I assume you meant health insurance, not life insurance. It doesn't make much sense to me that hitting the limits would be so rare. Why have the limits in the first place if that's the case? If they didn't make a difference, then they'd just be bad propaganda for the insurer. This random web page I looked up indicates that about 20,000 people are impacted by lifetime limits: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/healthcare/publications/lifetime-limits-impact.jhtml http://www.pwc.com/us/en/healthcare/publications/lifetime-li... This is not a huge number, but it's not completely irrelevant either. The pool it draws from will exclude the elderly, the study only looks at the people with employer-provided health insurance, and the 20,000 is from the 55% of those who have lifetime limits. The Census Bureau says that about 170 million people have employer-provided health insurance: http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf So we get about 93.5 million with employer-provided insurance with lifetime caps, and that in turn gives about a 0.02% chance of hitting a cap. Whether that qualifies as "exceedingly rare", I'm not sure. In any case, "$100,000 hospital bill" is probably a decent substitute for most people, although the odds of being bankrupted by that are probably considerably lower among the HN readership, at least.

smm2000 13y ago

I know one guy who got more than 1 million in bills at Microsoft. Long term cancer does that to you.