Insurance: Out of Pocket Rising Health Insurance Premiums and Deductibles

Oct 15 , 2019

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michael white

CRAZY-HIGH INSURANCE PREMIUMS AND DEDUCTABLES?

Years ago Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip stated “’ We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us”.

I am more and more concerned watching rising insurance premiums and deductibles pushing employee and individual health insurance out of reach for most Americans. Given poor health habits, childlike dependence on abdicating personal responsibility for food, we have become our own parasites. Poor food choices juxtaposed with Insurance industry $$ bottom lines and clever ways to deny claims, it is easy to anticipate these rises in costs and lack of health and economic sustainability. And they promise to get far worse.

“In 2016, over 4.5 billion prescriptions were filled, earning the pharmaceutical industry more than $200 billion,” according to an article by Richard Gale and Gary Null published by the Centre for Research on Globalization, an independent research and media organization.

44 states file suit against drug companies for inflating prices.

Yet we’re still close to the sickest country on the planet. And all these drugs are often just adding to the problem. According to a 2011 report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, in that same year, drugs were associated with 2 million to 4 million people in the United States experiencing serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.

To put things into perspective. Opioid crisis. Antibiotic-resistance epidemic. Grotesque obesity stats. Rising rates of metabolic syndrome. Skyrocketing autoimmune conditions.

In 2019, the United States will spend about “$3.5 trillion on "health" care, in addition to a $1.5 trillion loss in work and wages due to illness,” according to Gale and Null.

Insurance deductibles now account for more than half of out of pocket expenses. Imagine how would it be if those people did not get sick and not need to spend money to pay for the deductibles in the first place? I am pretty sure most families could certainly use an extra thousand dollars a month.

I hear very little about incentivizing or requiring people to take personal responsibility for what they stick in their mouth and adopt moderate exercise. It is so very simple. What you should not eat, too little exercise and excessive stress levels are the main causes for ALL chronic illness including obesity. They FEED each other negatively. No pun intended.

Arguably 80+% of chronic illness is based on either stress or poor diet or both. Unless we change this we're never going to have any kind of a healthy society and will forever stay manipulated by the processed, junk, fried food industry, Big Pharma and bought-and-sold politicians who may have one time been well meaning but got frustrated with lack of colleague support or too used to the income; sort of like being on elected welfare.

We are so far behind health-wise that we need to add ways to accelerate our health and well being and reduce our need for the so called "'healthcare" system which is really a "sick" care system. It thrives on keeping people barely well or barely not sick. Follow the money!

My mantra is "'you do not have to get sick, ever". To properly study sickness you must first study health and simply do what healthy people do.

Failing that then the accountable licensed Holistic Health professionals such as Holistic MDs, Chiropractors, Naturopaths, Clinical Nutritionists and surgeons need to enter the equation. Dr. Joseph Maroon, a tri-athlete and surgeon in his 70s, stated in the landmark docuseries Regain Your Brain that 49% of MDs suffer from burn out and many more from "Depersonalization". IE: 5 - 10 minutes with a patient is not even close to being long enough to get to know a person as a human being. A year ago "400 MDs committed suicide" he reported.

My holistic cardiologist and I spend 1-2 hours together ever 3-4 months or so. (He has a full patient load). He uses a 15 minute body scanner called InBody 570 that gives us some helpful measurements/insights.

Supplementation can be valid and quite helpful (we offer a few that I consider fundamental) but there are so many other choices and so many cell conditions that blood-work is often needed to clarify actual imbalances. Bostonhearthdiagnostics.com is one good blood-work source I use. Directlabs.com is another. Given the maelstrom of confusing and often self serving possibilities including over 10,000 individual billing codes that charge are for services that vary 5 or more times up or down for the same service, you can greatly enhance the odds of getting or staying healthy by adopting and/or strengthening basic health fundamentals, lowering your insurance cost and using the savings for day to day expenses including illness PREVENTION; You simply must reduce medical costs by reducing the need for them.

There is NO RATIONAL ALTERNATIVE.

Andrew Yang and Dr. Oz