How One Family Made the Decision & How You Can Too
Jennifer Heyns, an I Am Modern contributor, has just published a nonfiction book on healthcare. The inspiration for Bargaining for Our Lives came from her own family’s struggle with the decision to drop their HMO. They’ve been successfully navigating the world of healthcare for the past 8 years and have never looked back.
The book not only shows how living without health insurance can be a positive life lesson, it also gives comfort to those who are likewise without insurance, whether by choice or necessity.
Bargaining for Our Lives officially goes on sale on Amazon.com on Valentine’s Day and is available in paperback or Kindle download. The following is an excerpt from the first chapter.
Why and Why Not? How to Decide
It took a long, healthy period of consideration before we were comfortable with our decision to drop our HMO; there were several things we had to think about and look into first. One of the biggest obstacles to overcome is the mental and emotional barrier that keeps you with an HMO or other plan. Can we mentally and emotionally be without health insurance? It can seem really scary not having a plan in place, but ultimately it came down to this: without an insurance policy you just have to make alternate plans. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t prepared for medical crises. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t protecting your family. All it means is that you have other plans for your medical care. If your child breaks an arm and you aren’t insured it doesn’t mean you won’t seek or find the treatment he or she needs or that you won’t be able to afford the ambulance ride and hospital treatment. It just means that you are going to go about it a bit differently – especially the payment part.
I must admit when we first set out into the world of do-it-yourself medical care I was a bit ashamed of our insurance-less status. I didn’t want my mommy-friends to know or the preschool teachers, I was even embarrassed by the little N/A I had to write down in the insurance information box on our medical forms at the doctor’s office. I felt like the receptionists were looking down, even sneering, at me. Easy for them, I thought to myself, they probably get all the medical care in the world for free. Not only was I embarrassed and ashamed for others to know our little family secret, I was terrified that one of my sons would have a terrible accident – boys will be boys, you know! Or that one of my seemingly healthy little cherubs would be suddenly diagnosed with some life threatening disease, leaving us destitute from the expenses, or worse – unable to convince a doctor to care for him because we didn’t have an HMO to back us. I’m not sure where these fears came from but now that I look back on it I chalk it up to the fear of the unknown coupled with my extreme talent for always seeing the worst-case scenario in any situation.
The longer we went without health insurance the more I realized that my fears were unfounded. Not only were my fears allayed, I found more and more ways of securing better, more affordable care. The number of alternatives is staggering. There are so many factors that most of us never know or think about when we are in the HMO rut. So much information is not relayed to us and so we just chug along doing what the insurance company and doctors tell us, not because it’s wise or practical, but because it’s all we know.
I liken it to grade school. We were sent and send our children there and it’s a great way to get an education. But it isn’t until our children and we step out into the real world that we truly get an education and we come to realize that what we learned in school is just a fraction of what can potentially be learned.
As with any fearful situation, the more you learn about what you fear the more comfortable you become with it.
I also got over my embarrassment. Despite the odd looks I still get when people find out I have no insurance, I am much more confident in stating it now. Where once I would reply meekly, “No, we don’t have any,” blush and fade away, now I explain boldly, “No, we decided several years ago that we just didn’t want it; it didn’t make financial sense to us.” Many people are very intrigued by this and love to ask questions about how it works and how we’ve managed all these years without it. The more I explain, the more intrigued they become and I can spot a sense of jealousy in many faces at the thought of the bravery, freedom and lessons we’ve experienced since taking the world by storm.
Just as important as how you feel about living without health insurance is how this decision will affect your finances. This is a tricky equation to figure out but it really is a matter of simple math to determine approximately how much money you would spend each year with and without insurance and compare the two.
The first step was gathering all of our medical receipts from the previous 12-month period, including doctor’s visits, prescription and over-the-counter medications, insurance premiums, laboratory invoices and any other pertinent expenses. Then we added up everything that we’d paid out-of-pocket over the past 12 months.
The next step got a little tricky and involved calling doctors and our insurance company for information. What we were trying to determine is what our expenses would have been had we not been covered by insurance. First, we took out all of our insurance payments. What was left were the receipts, invoices and bills for our actual medical expenses. For our doctor’s visits, instead of looking at what we’d paid for the co-payments, we had to look at what the actual bill total was and add that in. Then we did the same for our prescription medications and other receipts. Some of the invoices only showed our portion of the bill after insurance so we then had to ask the doctor, pharmacist or insurance company what the total bill was or would have been if the HMO hadn‘t been involved.
For more about the author visit www.JenniferHeyns.com or follow on Twitter (@jeheyns) or join the group “Bargaining for Our Lives” on FaceBook.
written by Jennifer Heyns , February 05, 2010
written by Yvonne , February 05, 2010
Health care premiums go up every year; coverage goes down; you never know ahead of time what a doctor's visit or hospital visit will end up costing you even if you are insured.
Does your book address how to handle catastrophic illness or accidents without health insurance?
written by kim kunkel , February 04, 2010
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