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Health Choice-- A Casino
Aircraft Assembly & Test
Health Choice -- A Casino?
by
Skip Brown AE Executive Board
As everyone knows insurance companies are the biggest, legal bookies going. The basic business model is covering a customer who wants to bet that a “catastrophe” will befall him or her. Some “catastrophe” examples are car accidents, house fires, etc… How it works is simple. You bet the insurance company your house will burn to the ground this year and they bet you it won’t. You agree to give them a certain amount of cash (payments are often spread out over the year) and they promise to rebuild the house if the fire happens. At the end of the year, if there was no fire, the insurance company wins the wager and keeps the money. If there was a fire, the insurance company loses and pays to rebuild the house. Not much different from a casino. Sit at the blackjack table and bet that your cards will beat the dealers. If they do, the dealer pays, they don’t and the dealer keeps your cash.
Medical insurance has always been different. Since it’s pretty much a guarantee that over the course of a year everyone will have a medical bill of some type, no insurance company in its right mind would use the normal business model. That’s why medical insurance is called a “plan” and treated not as an option but as a necessity, one that the Union has fought fiercely for at every contract negotiation.
The levels of benefits we currently enjoy have come at a cost. We have given up higher wage increases, time-off, better pensions, etc… to win and keep our medical plan.
This year the company has let us know in no uncertain terms that they want to change all that. They may color it in terms like “increased contributions”, “higher deductibles”, but what they really want to change is the basic business model. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. This isn’t about higher contributions; it’s about changing from a medical plan to a catastrophic policy. No different than the fire insurance I mentioned earlier.
Look closer at the numbers. With option #1, you have to spend out of pocket, over $5,300.00 and all the HRA funds ($1k) before the company will even start paying a percentage of the bills. The bills have to total over $19,500.00 before you finally stop paying. By then you will have spent out of pocket, over $8,800.00.
How is this like the “bookie-style” insurance? If you’re married with children and a working spouse who chose to decline their company’s medical plan (that action is starting to become the exception in management) you will have to wager over $4300.00 through payroll deductions. You will be betting that your medical bills will exceed $2,000.00 and the company will start paying, though the payments will still be only a percentage. If your bills don’t exceed $2,000.00, guess what, you lose…company wins. If you subtract the $1k they put in the HRA, it leaves a tidy profit of over $3300.00.
The medical bills will still have to be almost 9K before company payments equal your payments.
For a more detailed breakdown and some scenarios, visit the website at:
http://local201iuecwa.org/
click “GE CONTRACT 2011”
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