Healthcare "Insurance" is a misnomer. It's the only "Insurance" a consumer utilizes regularly. Your auto insurance doesn't pay for an oil change. Why does health insurance pay for a yearly check up? Do you look forward to using your auto insurance? Heck no. If you need to use that insurance you've had an incident. Life insurance? No, you certainly don't want to use that. ...but health insurance? Sure! Sign me up for that battery of tests. It doesn't "cost" me anything.
This is a poor analogy. Auto insurance is liability insurance covering injury to others. Try taking off your collision damage coverage - it’s so cheap there is no real point in removing it.
Healthcare is risk pooling no matter how you look at it. It can only be afforded by
anybody in a pool where the vast majority of people are payers instead of heavy users. It is absolutely insurance in younger years where the risk of catastrophic occurance is low, but the economic risk of the event is very high. There is a reason that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy filings in the U.S.
In older years, health insurance resembles more of a life insurance policy payout as consumption increases. There is nothing to figure out - we have a simple ability to pay into a system in younger years that statistically will pay back out in later years, or we can go back to the days where the elderly simply bore the ravages of aging without the benefit of consistent medical care.
It is a crisis as employer provided coverage and workers are well aware. The number one reason real wages have declined is skyrocketing healthcare costs. Healthcare premiums are in your salary and most of what people could receive as wage growth is being consumed in premium increases. This stagnation over decades is killing real economic growth.
The U.S. has a particularly ugly issue in that our politics tend to send regulatory issues to the point of greatest cost (health) to the benefit of economic “growth” numbers.
At the individual level, you should be spending around 25% of your budget on food vs. the U.S. average of around 8%. Food budgets correlate to sick care budgets, but when real wages are falling, the squeeze has to come from somewhere. My food budget is bigger than my mortgage.
Somewhere in there is a how we assess quality of life over quantity.
I put everything on my credit card..$1200/mth in daycare..all the bills..the cashback is enormous.
), so while I rely on electronic banking transfers, I always check my balances after to ensure the transaction was actually completed. Gots to make sure the gremlins (and the hackers) stayed away.