@crystal626 wrote:
Yeah I have a PPO with UHC. I get $111 a month to spend on groceries. It's better than $0 and usually covers a trip to the grocery store, sometimes two. I had the HMO which gave me $210 a month but they added a referral requirement to see specialists this year for the first time since COVID and I didn't want to deal with it so I changed from the HMO to the PPO during the Advantage open enrollment period (which is how I knew about it). The government cut off the experimental program that was funding the benefit primarily though so you have to fit one of a number of chronic health conditions to qualify to use it for food now.
My plan has $3000 of dental and $300 a year for glasses. I put the dental to work. The glasses benefit unfortunately doesn't really help me because I buy special frames for dry eye that aren't sold by covered optometrists and they require polycarbonate lenses, which are considered an upgrade, so I have to pay for the lenses myself. I get the free vision exam and that's it. I've heard that Humana has much better vision benefits, allowing you to spend the allowance on upgrades as well, but UHC is the better option for me for now so I have stuck with it.
My vision corrects to 20/15 in both eyes when they get my precription right and my dry eye is behaving but I also have astigmatism and I'm near-sighted so I also struggle if I don't have my glasses on. I hear you there.
I have been on Advantage plans, Humana one year and UHC the rest, since 2017. I've never had any issues getting care. Both UHC and Humana have huge networks nearby, with a lot of overlap.
In Illinois it seems to be Aetna, Wellcare, and BCBS of Illinois that are big.
Wellcare is already handling my Part D since I parkeed it on the $0 plan. It shocked me the other day that it actually covered some Triamcinalone cream with a $1.86 copay. I was figuring on paying $19 through GoodRX Gold.
95% of the time I'm better off skipping Part D and using Gold. Like I said before, if Social Security doesn't come through on Extra Help, I'm going to scuttle Gold and change to Companion for the next year. Their drug prices are obviously better enough that the math works. For about $30 more per year I'll save over $200 vs. Gold.
Somehow, GoodRX is becoming a force of their own in prescription drugs and they beat the tar out of Part D and most private insurance.
24 years ago I got a union job, there actually were some left that didn't get killed by neoconservative trade deals yet, and it came with a factory whistle and everything.
True story, the healthcare plan said $10 to see the doctor. $10 brand name drugs, $5 generics. Employer paid 100% of the premium.
I ended up quitting that job because I moved. The next job had insurance that was okay, not as good as that, but okay. I had to pay $15 per weekly paycheck for it. When I quit, I got a COBRA letter that said it would have cost me $650 a month to keep it, that was 21 years ago.
Last year I helped my mom's church friend who is horrible with money do her taxes. Her husband hadn't died yet, but he was in such poor health he was disoriented and she was well on her way to squandering their life savings. She has since lost their marital residence.
She went through over $60,000 between their savings and the tools and stuff she sold off, sold the house for $174,000 and had $150,000 left after paying a HELOC credit card she took out to get allergy shots and "go to school to learn to write children's books", and then never wrote any.
Then she bought a mobile home. The lot rent is $450 a month. That should be doable until she gets Social Security in 6 years, but the way this woman spends money it'll never last six years. She's already talking about putting in central air which is going to cost half of what the mobile home did, on a lot she doesn't own, that already told her the rent goes up every year. (You can rent an entire apartment, 2 br, in that town for about $750, but she can't prove she has any income, so she had to do the trailer.)
She actually had the nerve to complain to me last year when I helped her with the taxes "This Obamacare is just junk. I can't believe it costs $47 a month! Can you believe it costs $47 a month!?" (It pays almost all of her medical bills for that.)
I told her, "You know most people are paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance." and she was like "They are!?"
Like, it just proves that something given has no value to most people. She can't fathom that a $47 a month policy that pays nearly all of her medical bills is a good deal.
It's not necessarily a product of being bad with money, not working for thirty years, or not having a college degree.
I was reading a blog post by Jamie Zawinski, who made a fortune after AOL acquired Netscape, and he invested a lot of that into going into the restaurant and bar scenes in San Francisco, and setting up a hacker themed bar and pizza club.
He said that there was an offer by CVS Health to have a nurse come out and do "free flu shots", and then he declined when he found out that they are not really free. That you have to have a health insurance card.
I said, "Well what's the big deal then? You're in San Francisco. Everyone there has an insurance card of some kind. Either they get it at work, the Marketplace, Medicaid, or the city because the city will give you one if you can't get one anywhere else."
He said, "Well, people don't tend to carry their health insurance cards on them."
I said, "Who doesn't carry a health insurance card in America, which is infamous for carting people into the ER and deciding what they're actually going to bother to do for you based on the card they find in your wallet? It's called a wallet biopsy."
He said, "Well, the point is that CVS said that the flu shots were free and they weren't free."
I said, "You're in America, which is infamous for having every single medical procedure and medication cost 2-14 times what it does in every other Western country and making paying for it entirely your problem, and you thought that when they said free they meant free?"
I think that's when he banned me from comments on his blog.
The interaction with Jamie Zawinski (jwz) is a masterpiece of reality checking someone who has been insulated by dot-com millions for far too long.
To get banned from a legendary Netscape coder's blog for explaining how the American healthcare system actually functions is a badge of honor.
Expecting a massive corporate entity like CVS Health to hand out completely "free" care out of the goodness of their hearts without collecting a single insurance premium or tax-subsidized billing code is a level of naive idealism you only find in tech billionaires or people who haven't had to look at a medical bill since 1995.
The county health departments are an excellent resource where the flu shots really are free. You go in there, show them insurance if you have it, and it helps them run the clinic and give the flu shots to people who don't have any insurance, but CVS isn't going to do it.
You have to wonder how a guy can have all that money and run a small business and not understand that nothing is free and that goes double for medicine in America.
While the health department uses insurance and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to help the uninsured get flu shots, the retail pharmacies just stick out a fraudulent "free flu shots" sign and then in size 1 fonts you can't even read with 20/20 eyesight it says "with insurance or Medicare". In other words, someone else pays.
GoodRX Gold's app tells me what a flu shot costs. In cash. At one of those places. They charge $87 on average. $87 is not free. Someone should sue them and make them put "with insurance" in bigger font.
CVS takes that flu shot money and instead of helping others they send out dividends to shareholders. That's why I'm getting my flu shot at the county this year.
They're cooking up an mRNA shot, they approved it for people over 50 this year. In clinical trials, it was no more effective, it just had more side effects. Their goal is probably to take something that costs $87 and make it cost $187.
The flu shot was only $29 with cash in 2016. What the hell happened in ten years? Greedflation.
The government obligated Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance to cover vaccinations with no co-pay, which is great if you don't see thee actual cost. For everyone else, vaccines surged because greedy corporations can get that much from insurance and the government now.
If you have no insurance, you start seeing things like "You need a shot for pneumonia? Okay, I hope you have $384 in your wallet."
