By Vanessa Ho with seattlepi.com:
Andrew ["Bull"] Stewart needed health care for his family, but couldn’t afford the rates, even as a small-business owner. So when a friendly insurance agent pitched him a deal — $750 a month for him, his wife and three of their kids — he took it.
“We read everything, and it looked like it was really good,” said Stewart, a robust man who owns the Columbia City Fitness gym in Seattle.
But a year later, his wife underwent surgery and Stewart was saddled with $20,000 in medical bills. He has been quarreling since with the insurance company, which said his wife had a pre-existing condition. Read more.
Bull Stewart and his wife Flo own Columbia City Fitness located at 4860 Rainier Avenue South. Photo/do communications, inc.
Loading ...
{ 2 comments }
This is a real shame – the family is so promoted to wellness and health!
This is such a problem, in addition to the uninsured we have millions of under-insured. They usually don’t even know it. Especially if you have an individual plan, not through some big company with a team of people paid to negotiate and interpret plan provisions.
I actually used to be one of those people for a large local employer, and I can honestly tell you that the average person does not understand what all the interacting pieces of the puzzle/small print in their policies mean until they have to use it. If you’re lucky, you’ll never find out. Even if you could understand your plan, you’d have to dedicate a lot of time to investigating what every little thing means.
In the individual plan marketplace, we need standardized plan designs that offer levels of coverage for the consumer to choose from. If you choose to gamble with the catastrophic plan, you roll the dice on your own dime. The choice should be there, but you should know you are doing it. We can’t sustain this system where every insurance company is offering a dozen different plans with thousands of plan “nuances” that the average person can’t decipher.
Our state insurance commissioner needs to figure out how to balance offering a stable business environment for the insurance companies to operate with a margin, but not rip off our consumers with insurance-ese smoke and mirrors. Mandating single lines of coverage has left us with plans that cover chiropractic better than cancer. (I don’t have anything against chiropractic coverage, but we’ve lost sight of the basic principle of risk sharing in our system).
No one who is insured should EVER end up with a $130,000 bill. Well unless they’re octomom and it was for cosmetic bs to make them look like Angelina.
ridiculous.
Comments on this entry are closed.