HALF US BANKRUPTCIES THANKS TO MEDICAL BILLS

I'm a big believer that some of the most common, taken-for-granted things in America are total fricken scams (I know "fricken" isn't a word, just get beyond it). Insurance is definitely one of them. In a nutshell, here's how it works:

1) You pay a monthly/yearly fee for as long as you want to be insured.
2) If you're never or rarely sick (and not very sick when you are sick) you don't get any of those fees you spent back. There's a deductible (a maximum amount you pay before insurance kicks in) which can be a lot of money depending on your plan. Regardless, you don't get your money back after ten years of being healthy--or even a lifetime of being healthy.
3) If you do get sick--really sick--often times the insurance companies will dance a little jig with you in order for them to pay less than they should. So, you have to scream and yell and holler until they cover the procedure you need.

What happens in these situations? You pay up and if you can't, you go into bankruptcy. In fact, as the title of this blog entry suggests, according to an article from Reuters.com at News.Yahoo.Com, half of all personal bankruptcies result from extreme medical bills. Here's an excerpt:

The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted.

"Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who led the study.

Too bad all that money those people probably paid into their insurance plans couldn't cover everything.

Here's how insurance should work (in my opinion, anyway):

1) From birth, each of us (or our parents) puts 10% of any income into an account.
2) The bank/insurance company take 1% off of that. (This is how they profit.)
3) At ANY TIME and for ANY EMERGENCY each person can take money out of said account. This means that for car accidents, brain tumors, natural disasters, etc, people can get the money their money back, as opposed to losing it completely.

Essentially, it's just a bank account with a twist.

Sure, it's not a perfect plan, but neither is insurance the way it is. Insurance rarely covers everything in a truly bad situation (according to that study, it happens only half the time) and they try to dick you around so they don't have to cover as much as you need/want them to.

Just my two yen, as always...