Posted on 11/02/2016 8:30:25 AM PDT by Sequoyah101
The basic premium for just my wife and I goes from $14,400 a year in Texas and change to $24,000 a year or more in Oklahoma. The deductible has gone from $6,000 to more than $7,000. Apparently BCBS is the only insurer in Oklahoma now, period. Exchange or otherwise.
So much for competition.I guess some of you have started the agony of looking for health care coverage again. In my case not only is there sticker shock there is much complication since I am an American Indian, my wife is not and I may have some options. I can choose to not get insurance but my wife can't and I would not pay the penalty but she would, I think. It is a mess.
How can any normal family afford this?
A friend that runs a local coffee shop here in S. MS said his premiums doubled and his deductibles cranked up too - he needs to have more than $15K of expenses before the “insurance” kicks in....and MS is a pretty low COL State.
I think its not slamming enough people yet
The very wealthy aren’t concerned about cost. The poor and lower middle class get Obamacare subsidies. Much of the middle class, and certainly all government workers, still have health-care paid for by employers.
That leaves small businesses and self-employed left to really bear the brunt of this.
We already see the results economically - for the first time after any recession, small businesses are not expanding hiring. This has been true for all the Obama years. The labor force has actually shrunk as working adults are at 50 year lows. Of course, costs for Obamacare far exceed estimates.
meanwhile, Fed.gov pays for it all with printed dollars at zero interest rates, courtesy of the Federal Reserve. Thus the game of extend-and-pretend continues.
Save your Money and if you need anything that is Not Life Threatening and deemed an emergency that needs to be taken care of immediately, and go to here for your medical needs, it is about 1/5 to 1/3 the COST of ANYWHERE ELSE in America.
Surely she can find some native American ancestry in her family lore.... High cheekbones perhaps? Take an ancestry dna test and claim exemption from whatever protected class she can find! Or she could claim to be a muslim .... Interesting that protected groups are exempt from obamacare,,,, as if it was some kind of group burden ... Which no one questions the reasoning?
My wife and I use Christian Healthcare Ministries instead of normal health insurance. It costs $150 a month a piece for their “Gold Plan” and we spend a couple hundred dollars a year for their “Brother’s Keeper” program which eliminates any limits in coverage. Our deductible is $500. It is an IRS approved alternative to normal health insurance. We also have an IRS approved tax deductible health care savings plan which we put $500 of our savings over normal Health Insurance into every month. It currently has over $12,000 in it, even after we have used it for expenses such as dental, glasses, prescriptions, Band-Aids, checkups and any other medical expenses that would not be covered by CHM but is allowed by the IRS. We have a Visa debit card associated with the account that we use at the drug store, Costco Optical, or wherever.
Christian Healthcare Ministries has been around for 25 years and has enabled Christians to share over a billion dollars in healthcare expenses. There are several other well established health cost sharing ministries that are approved by the IRS as well. I just know about CHM because we have been using them for several years.
https://www.chministries.org/default.aspx
Why waste another dime on ridiculously priced health insurance to pay for other people’s abortions, sex change operations, or drug abuse treatment?
Thanks. I have been leery of this but it is recommended by many. What do you consider to be the downside?
Bump for screwing OBAMACARE, a scam meant to cause economic havoc, which it has. Hussein Obama as a traitorous liar is in the White House to cause problems, not real solutions.
https://www.chministries.org/default.aspx
Obamacare will soon fail, and by cancelling mine last year, I helped make it sooner, rather than later.
Because some of us aren't Christians and there isn't an option for us.
I am dropping Obamacare because next year's premiums will come to above the cutoff point that you can dump it and avoid the penalty.
Be leery no more. CHM gives you little cards that look like the ones that we used to get from Regence when we had normal health insurance that you can show to the doctor's office. To keep costs down CHM asks for you to “negotiate” with your health care provider and get at least their “cash” price. If you are just in for a check-up you will be paying for it with cash in the first place... we use our IRS approved health savings plan debit card. There is a short explanation on the back of the CHM card along with their phone number if the provider has any questions about how it works.
In the past we always received statements showing what was billed and then what was actually paid by the insurance company. What was paid was by Regence was almost always half or sometimes much less than half of the original bill. So I have absolutely no problem asking for a discount; some sensitive people might be squeamish about “negotiating” with the staff at their doctor's office. But if you have them call the number you can have CHM staff talk to them for you. In every case so far if the staff wasn't already familiar with health cost sharing ministries they were mostly just curious how it worked.
The only other “downside” is that you can't put money in your IRS approved health savings plan and then use your tax free money to pay your “premium” because the IRS does not consider the money you pay to a health cost sharing ministry to be a healthcare expense. Personally, I think that money you spend on this type of plan which is saving the government big money on subsidies ought to be deductible from your income like the interest on your mortgage.
Oh, and my biological great-grandfather was a full blooded Sioux Indian. But my great-grandfather of record had been partially paralyzed in a farming accident after having just two children. My great grandparents immigrated from Norway to rural North Dakota. Both my grandmother and my great uncle were conceived after the accident and had black hair and brown eyes and bore a striking resemblance to the handyman who moved in to keep the farm going after the accident. This caused some social problems for my grandmother and great uncle and they both moved from the community as soon as the were old enough.
Bluntly,. you are a cry baby and that is total BS. CHM asks that you provide the name of a Church that you belong to, but I do not know if they do anything to verify. I know plenty of people who go to church who seem to have no problem voting for someone like Hillary. If you reading this here you are just as “Christian” as they are as far as I am concerned.
My very blunt advice to you... listen to a Christian Radio Station for ten minutes, visit a church on Sunday and introduce yourself. You might even make a friend or two. Take a chance and invite Jesus into your heart. If you do not feel that you mean it say a little prayer in your head and ask him to forgive your "hardened" heart. Fill out the Christian Healthcare Ministry form online, pay the pittance which is less than what your fine for not having insurance will be. If you someday get questioned about it... which you won't, just admit you have done a little backsliding since your “conversion”. No one other than yourself is going to give a rats behind. And in my mind you will still be more honest and Christian than anyone claiming to be Christian who is voting for Hillary.
Sorry for the rant.
From their website: To be CHM members, participating adults must be Christians living by biblical principles, including abstaining from the use of tobacco and the illegal use of drugs, following biblical teaching on the use of alcohol, and attending group worship regularly if health permits.
You seem to be suggesting that no one will verify and that attending church and saying I'm Christian, which I thought meant accepting Jesus as your savior, is enough. That's called lying.
And you don't know anything about my heart, hardened or otherwise. I said I'm not aware of any similar options like the one you have and you tell me to fudge the truth and get some friends at church.
Thanks for your help.
I do not know your heart, but chances are that if you are here you are probably not a full on late term abortion supporting Clinton lover. And the fact that you are so concerned about “lying” about something only you will ever know about what is in your own heart, even when it could create a huge financial advantage for you compared to Obamacare... says a lot about your principles, character and upbringing. I already trust you more as a friend than a sizeable percentage of the people I go to church with.
You may be filled with the Holy Spirit a lot more than your head allows you to acknowledge to yourself or in a public forum. To me it sounds like you are already living your life by Christian principles. I don’t expect any kind of response... just for think about it. Sometimes we are led in ways that are not obvious to us. And sometimes that principled inner that we cannot seem to ignore is actually from something more than just the way were brought up.
If you are more comfortable paying thousands of dollars a month, or paying a huge fine to the IRS because you don’t want the rest of us to think you are a Christian... it certainly makes no difference to me. But it feels like maybe you are going a little out of your way to deny that God has more influence over your life than you are comfortable acknowledging.
Oh, and try and lighten up a little. Life is meant to be full of fun and joy. If you had dangerous hobbies like I do, like jumping off of cliffs with a hang glider or flying through storms in a small airplane, or my former profession fire fighting you would probably have learned to ask God for help. It doesn’t mean that those of us who call ourselves Christian’s are a lot more spiritual than others. Some of us have just had so many close calls that we start to realize that divine intervention is the only reasonable explanation for our still being around.
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