How much do you pay for health insurance

[UtwigMU]

I'm wondering how much people in other countries pay for health insurance. Here there is mandatory state health insurance which is paid by employer if you're employed. (If employer doesn't pay, national tax office puts a block on company account and takes the money). This amounts to about 100 EUR for minimum salary and is progressive (goes up with salary but quality of health service is the same for everyone).

Children and students are insured by parents, pensioners, unemployed by state.

Then there is voluntary health insurance which amounts only 25 euros a month for everyone which each person must pay out of pocket. If you're poor you can ask your local community/town/city to pay it for you. If you don't have this they will only do urgent procedures (life endangered).

So in best case (minimum wage) employed person pays about 1500 EUR annually (he/she doesn't see the cash flow his employer has to pay for him, he/she only sees 25 EUR a month). If your salary is high you can pay much more, it's progressive. Someone with average salary pays 1900 annually and highly paid manager of big profitable pharmaceutical company pays 10s of 1000s of Euros a year.

The service you get for this is crap unless you are very sick or had an accident. Most of health workers and nurses are unfriendly (it's not their fault that they work in bad health system). If you want to wait less than a few months for something non-urgent you either need social connections or have to pay out of pocket at private doctors. People/business to who I generate much less income annually are a lot friendlier to me than national health system.

How is this in other countries?

[Brian Ellis]

As a Swiss pensioner, I'm obliged to pay for insurance in Switzerland, costing about CHF 100/month. This covers free health care in Cyprus as if I were a Cypriot pensioner (essentially state hospitals, not GPs who charge €20 for an ordinary consultation). Can't complain at that as I've had two pacemakers and 6-monthly checkups for donkey's years, two urinogenital interventions with at least 20 specialist consultations (5 pills/day), 6 cardiologist consultations (5 pills/day for hypertension) and corticosteroid treatment for 2+ years for GCA and PMR (10-15 pills/day) with specialist consultations every 2 months on average, 4 CT scans and n X-rays. Guess I win out as two pacemakers, including the surgery, would have cost €20,000 each in the private sector!

[Jammrock]

In my current job I pay nothing. There are some services and medications that I have to pay for, most of which is subsidized so I would rarely pay full price for anything. When we had our last child we paid nothing in medical expenses. When my wife had her gallbladder out we paid nothing. It's very nice insurance.

Before my current job at Microsoft I paid about $900/month for really crappy insurance for my family of 5. Everything had a co-pay, or they only partially paid. It was a pain in the ass to get anything done. We paid so much money for sub-par insurance that we almost switched to catastrophic health insurance (they only cover medical emergencies, not the regular doctor stuff) and did all our doctor visits in cash.

[RANT]
Now comes the big stinker. The medical act signed into law by Pres Obama will turn my awesome insurance back into crappy insurance, where I have to pay for and fight for everything. Why? Because the gov is going to tax the hell out of anyone who actually provides good health care to their employees. I understand the intent of the bill, but it was poorly thought through.

No matter what else Obama has done I won't vote for him because of this one simple act, ****ing over the American health care system more than it already was. No company is going to pay the health care plan tax. Every single company is simply dropping their insurance coverage so they squeak in under the taxable rate. So all that cash flow the health care act thinks it's getting won't ever come.

The end result is the government can't provide the support it promised to the poor, the middle class gets ****ed, and the corporate executives get to laugh all the way to the bank because their health insurance costs just got cut in half.
[/RANT]

At least I get one more year of good health care.

[Dr Mordrid]

Good ole' ObamaCare - may he rot in wormy Hell for that abomination

He and the scewball Dems have f'ed over everyone who had good insurance instead of just doing something for those who didn't and leaving the rest of us alone. Once they start figuring it out there's going to be some real pi**ed off people out there.

0$ premium.

$10 for clinic visits, $10 for generic drugs (but I can get most for $4 at WalMart), and $20 for non-generic drugs.

1 free pair of glasses/year including the exam. $10 co-pay on all ophthalmological services, including surgeries and laser procedures.

Dental exams and routine care etc. free, but 50% coverage on things like extractions, crowns etc.

[TransformX]

If you can't afford a doctor...

[Brian Ellis]

Good ole' ObamaCare - may he rot in wormy Hell for that abomination

He and the scewball Dems have f'ed over everyone who had good insurance instead of just doing something for those who didn't and leaving the rest of us alone. Once they start figuring it out there's going to be some real pi**ed off people out there.

0$ premium.

$10 for clinic visits, $10 for generic drugs (but I can get most for $4 at WalMart), and $20 for non-generic drugs.

1 free pair of glasses/year including the exam. $10 co-pay on all ophthalmological services, including surgeries and laser procedures.

Dental exams and routine care etc. free, but 50% coverage on things like extractions, crowns etc.

Bit tough! The middle/upper incomes may be at a disadvantage but think of the zillions who cannot have your privileges.

I'm surprised at you, Doc, living in a region where whole neighbourhoods are in ruin and millions of blacks (and whites) with almost no income who could not afford any healthcare are at an unhealthy subsistence level. And you cannot get most generic drugs at 4 bucks. All the 14 drugs I take are generic and, if I had to pay for them, would cost me about €640/prescription for 2 months. My daughter's insurance pays ~CHF 2000/month for her MS generics. $10 for a cataract operation that would otherwise cost $2000 or more sounds fine to me.

[Dr Mordrid]

Low income folks have medicaid and other options & programs, so what Obama etc. should have addressed was closing the gaps in coverage and expanding it for the uninsured- not reinventing the goddamned wheel for everyone else to the point their coverage gets f*cked up.

That great coverage of ours? We could well lose it if my wife's employer decides to pay the (miniscule) fine instead of providing coverage - which would be the cheaper of the two options. In that case we end up with crap Obamacare basic coverage, just like Jammrock.

If there's a way they could have screwed Obamacare up any worse I sure as Hell don't know what it would be, which is probably why 55-60% of voters oppose it to this day. Once the ramifications fully sink in to the inattentive that'll go way up.

It hits the US Supreme Court this spring, and they've scheduled an unprecedented full week of hearings over the constitutional issues. No surprise - the majority of US State Attorney Generals are challenging it.

[cjolley]

That great coverage of ours? We could well lose it if my wife's employer decides to pay the (miniscule) fine instead of providing coverage - which would be the cheaper of the two options.

I've never understood this argument.
There has never been a requirement that employers provide any health insurance at all.
Hasn't it always been cheaper to not cover your employees?
What will change about that?



PS http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/hr3590.asp

2011 W-2 Tax Forms and HR3590

Claim: Starting in 2011, all employees will have to pay taxes on the value of health insurance provided by their employers.

FALSE
Example: [Collected via e-mail, May 2010]

I contacted my Congressman about House bill HR 3590, the health care bill. I asked for a summary of changes.

The Aid directed me to go to www.thomas.gov, enter HR 3590 in the search box and look for summaries.

Starting in 2011 (next year folks) your W-2 tax form sent by your employer will be increased to show the value of whatever health insurance you are given by the company. It does not matter if that's a private concern or Governmental body of some sort.

If you're retired? So what; your gross WILL go up by the amount of insurance you get.

You will be required to pay taxes on a large sum of money that you have never seen.

Take your tax form you just finished and see what $15,000 or $20,000 additional gross does to your tax debt. That's what you'll pay next year.

For many it also puts you into a new higher bracket so it's even worse.

This is how the government is going to buy insurance for 15% that don't have insurance and it's only part of the tax increases.

Not believing this I researched the summaries and here's what I'm reading:

On page 25 of 29:
TITLE IX REVENUE PROVISIONS- SUBTITLE A: REVENUE OFFSET PROVISIONS - (sec. 9001, as modified by sec. 10901)
Sec.9002.
"requires employers to include in the W-2 form of each employee the aggregate cost of applicable employer sponsored group health coverage that is excludable from the employee's gross income."

Joan Pryde is the senior tax editor for the Kiplinger letters. Go to Kiplinger's and read about 13 tax changes that could affect you. Number 3 is what I just told you about.

Why am I sending you this? The same reason I hope you forward this to every single person in your address book. People have the right to know the truth because an election is coming in November and we need to vote in Conservatives that will repel this horrid law!




Origins: This is another case of a legislative issue which has a kernel of truth to it, but which has been misinterpreted, affects only a small percentage of the population, and has misleadingly been blown out of proportion through someone's mistaken assumption that it applies to everyone.

Section 9002 of PPACA, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590), requires that all employers, beginning in 2011, report the aggregate cost of employer-sponsored health benefits they provide to employees on those employees' W-2 forms. However, the monetary values so reported will neither be counted as gross income nor will they be taxed; they will be included for informational purposes only. (Section 106A of the Internal Revenue Code states that, in general, employer-provided health coverage is not taxable to the employee.)

The portion (Title IX, Sec. 9001) of the PPACA referenced above is entitled "Excise Tax on High Cost Employer-Sponsored Coverage." This is the section of the recently passed health care reform legislation that addresses taxing so-called high-level "Cadillac" health care plans that some employees receive through their employers.

In general, beginning in 2018 (not 2011), the PPACA imposes a 40% excise tax on the value of employer-sponsored medical insurance that exceeds a given threshold (initially $27,500 annually). This excise tax would be paid by the insurance company, not the employee, and is initially expected to affect fewer than 10% of families covered by health insurance: Many employers pay most of the premium for health coverage. Workers pick up the rest but pay no taxes on the employer's often-substantial contribution. That's why many unions have bargained hard for generous health coverage over the years, even if that meant forgoing a bigger pay raise.

The new agreement would take away the tax advantage for a small portion of the health benefit by imposing a 40 percent tax on the amount by which the premiums for employer-sponsored health coverage exceed specified thresholds. That would be $27,500 a year for a family, starting in 2018. The tax on a $29,500 plan would be $800, or 40 percent of $2,000. The insurance company would pay the tax but would almost certainly pass it along to the employer and its employees.

That $27,500 threshold is well above the current average of $13,400 for a family plan. By 2016, more than 80 percent of all family plans are projected to still fall below the threshold. In the following years, the tax threshold would rise more slowly than the likely rate of inflation in medical costs, which could mean the plans of millions of workers — a small minority of the work force — would be subject to the tax in theory.

Most likely, insurers will drop their premiums just below the threshold. They could do that by setting higher deductibles and co-payments, managing access to care more tightly, or reducing benefits.
Last updated: 25 May 2010

[Dr Mordrid]

Yeah, and your example isn't worth crap because it has nothing to do with those supposed taxes. It has to do with exchanges.

Employers will either keep providing coverage or drop it and force their people into the exchanges and pay a fine that in most all cases is cheaper. This f*cks the employees royally, but that's how Barry, Harry & Nancy wrote the godforsaken monstrosity.

[cjolley]

Yeah, and your example isn't worth crap because it has nothing to do with those supposed taxes. It has to do with exchanges.

Employers will either keep providing coverage or drop it and force their people into the exchanges and pay a fine that in most all cases is cheaper. This f*cks the employees royally, but that's how Barry, Harry & Nancy wrote the godforsaken monstrosity.

It still doesn't make any sense.
WHY would they drop an employee's coverage if they haven't already?
It will cost companies more to drop employees after the law goes in to effect than it does right now.

What exactly is the new incentive to not cover employees?

[Dr Mordrid]

The problem with trying to figure out irrational laws is you can't do it rationally.

Report from June, 2011

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_US_health_care_reform_will_affect_employee_benefits_2813

How US health care reform will affect employee benefits

The shift away from employer-provided health insurance will be vastly greater than expected and will make sense for many companies and lower-income workers alike.

JUNE 2011 • Shubham Singhal, Jeris Stueland, and Drew Ungerman
Source: Healthcare Systems and Services Practice

US health care reform sets in motion the largest change in employer-provided health benefits in the post–World War II era. While the pace and timing are difficult to predict, McKinsey research points to a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored health benefits following the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Many of the law’s relevant provisions take effect in 2014. Our research suggests that when employers become more aware of the new economic and social incentives embedded in the law and of the option to restructure benefits beyond dropping or keeping them, many will make dramatic changes. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that only about 7 percent of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) will have to switch to subsidized-exchange policies in 2014. However, our early-2011 survey of more than 1,300 employers across industries, geographies, and employer sizes, as well as other proprietary research, found that reform will provoke a much greater response. More information about the survey methodology is available on the McKinsey & Company Web site.

• Overall, 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI in the years after 2014.

• Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50 percent, and upward of 60 percent will pursue some alternative to traditional ESI.

• At least 30 percent of employers would gain economically from dropping coverage even if they completely compensated employees for the change through other benefit offerings or higher salaries.

Contrary to what many employers assume, more than 85 percent of employees would remain at their jobs even if their employer stopped offering ESI, although about 60 percent would expect increased compensation.
>

[cjolley]

LOL, to translate:
"Companies will use the law as an excuse to drop employee coverage. They could have dropped it before to lower costs, but couldn't come up with a face saving rational."

Really?


The really laughable irony about your argument is that doing away with employer provided health insurance to make the market more natural is a right wing idea.

[Dr Mordrid]

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) came up with a similar report, and no matter who came up with the basic concept it took Barry, Harry & Nancy to f*ck it up this bad. Even members of their own party wanted manor fixes, but noooo....

[KRSESQ]

If the fixes are "minor," as you say, why not simply enact legislation making the fixes rather than trying to throw out the whole thing? That's certain to be more successful than an attempted all-out repeal.

Unless, of course, the Republicans would then have less to bitch about...

[Dr Mordrid]

This law is a tangled web on steroids. The way the parts of the bill are intertwined removing major sections is extremely difficult, and if the individual mandate falls in the SCOTUS the rest is unenforceable anyhow.