OT/ farm health insurance

Before I met my wife she had worked for a large health insurance company. She told me flat out it's a scam. So we did something different, something that might help especially the younger folks.

We self-insured. Basically we put away a small amount each month into a bank account strictly for medical and dental expenses. We pay cash for services from that account. We don't seek services for trivial things like "colds". We are responsible for our own medical knowledge; example: a doctor diagnosed her with a serious medical condition and wanted to put her on $300/month worth of pills for the rest of her life. We did our own research, got a second opinion, and found out she really had a minor thyroid problem solved by $12/month worth of pills.

Yes, you have to have discipline to put money away each month and not touch it for anything else so it may not be for everybody. But it can pay off; we have saved over $250k (premiums - actual costs) during our marriage through self-insurance.

I paid health insurance premiums for 14 years and never once met my deductable. Far as I was concerned it was a scam too. Now I have a 5 year old son that had a normal birth and seemed perfectly normal until he was two, then he was diagnosed with epilepsy. That diagnosis pretty much turned our world on end. Medications average $1500 a month, doctor, specialist and hospital bills ran over $47,000 in the past two years.

Then to top it off last July his two year old brother fell off the back of a tricycle (standing on the seat) and smacked his head on the garage floor, never lost consciousness and seemed fine twenty minutes later. Four hours later I was speeding to a ER with him laying in the back seat - turned out he had fractured his skull and was bleeding into his brain. Life flighted to a children's hospital where he spent 5 days in ICU and then 4 days in a regular room. Total bill is still being tallied but it excedes $40,000. Some people complain about insurance being so high, I wonder how it can be so cheap.

Jim