Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
I have $6,500 deductable. It&#x27;s insane how much work I need to do to get healthcare.<p>The biggest issue is price transparency. To get a price, I need the tax-id of the medical office and the procedure code. Often times the procedure code is unknown because I might have any number of different procedures, depending on what the diagnosis is.<p>So, I take my list of codes to the health insurance company with the tax ID and wait while they look everything up. This whole thing can take 2 hours.<p>That&#x27;s if everyone knows what they&#x27;re doing. Medical offices are so used to patients not asking about price, their back-office has no idea what to do when someone actually asks how much a procedure will cost.<p>Then there&#x27;s the insanity of cash price being cheaper than the insurance price. So, I need to decide if I want to pay $600 and have it go towards my deductible or $450 and pay cash.<p>I agreed to pay $450 cash and no one in the office understood how to handle it. I finally get to pay the $450 cash and I still got a bill from my insurance for $600 because they <i>also</i> billed my insurance.<p>You get that? I paid cash and my insurance company still got billed.<p>Then we have billing errors. I got billed for things I never asked for and&#x2F;or never received. More wasted time addressing that. Of course, back office is not used to patients reviewing their bill, so there&#x27;s more confusion to deal with.<p>I also have an HSA tax free bank account that lets me pay for this stupidity tax free, yay! Dozens of more hours were thrown away trying to understand how HSA accounts work, what I can charge to the HSA account and picking a bank to handle the HSA account.<p>I spent nearly 100 hours in the last few years dealing with health insurance bullshit.<p>Imagine how many more wasted hours other Americans deal with.<p>Fuck this shit already.