as small as a world and as large as alone, bittersnurr: So every so often I see posts of...

5:45pm September 12, 2014

So every so often I see posts of medical bills trying to outline how horrible and in debt you get from it. That’s one bill, how about a year of active treatment as a chronicly ill person?

Well my insurance has a handy website section called “claims status”. Basically, it’s a list of the bills my insurance has received. Note. This is ONLY INSURANCE this doesn’t count any OTC, holistic, anything else that isn’t covered. This includes bath seats, canes, TENs machines, anything experimental and a few of my medicines etc.

The first column is the date of service, the first price column is “total billed” (aka “what you pay out of pocket”) the last column is the “paid” one, as in how much medicaid was charged for the service. I thought it would be interesting to make a spreadsheet and add up the columns.

So last year, if I didn’t have health insurance, I would have had to pay ninety thousand dollars in bills.

Admittedly there are some factors skewing this a bit. Last year I had my major testing done for my illness that accounted for 40,000 of the 90,000 by itself. Last year I had regular physical therapy and more doctors visits. The result is this year so far, I would have only had to pay $15,880.86 instead. (At the current minimum wage working full time you’ll make $15,000 a year, for reference)

But a lot of that is because my insurance still doesn’t cover everything and I basically exhausted all my accessible treatment options last year. One way I have been saving money is I had to quit physical therapy, and I am waiting for insurance approval for anything else left to try.

I see a lot of posts about how terrifying it is to enter the world with tens of thousands of dollars of debt from college and being faced with nothing but minimum wage jobs.

Now imagine looking at your future and seeing this. Seeing this and knowing even a minimum wage job could put you over the income limit and then your health insurance goes away. Imagine you were too sick to finish college and are faced with job applications that openly ask questions like “how long can you stand” and being in a wheelchair.