What Does Health Insurance Cost?

from http://www.gormogons.com/2009/08/with-tremendously-important-debate.html

With the tremendously important debate currently taking place regarding the perceived need for healthcare reform and the government’s alleged responsibility to provide coverage for every person in this country – which your Mandarin can guarantee will include those in the country illegally through a blanket amnesty program, but that is another topic for another time – I began to wonder how much does health insurance actually cost.

So I spent some time today on the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois web site today to do some research. There were 9 different plans to choose from that ranged from all encompassing to hospitalization only. For purposes of this research I focused on two plans:

• Blue Choice Select:
o $5,000,000.00 Lifetime Benefit
o $30.00 Office Visit Co-pay
o Drug Card with $10.00 Co-pay for Generics
o $6,000.00 (Family of 4*)/$3,000 (Individual**) Out of Pocket Limit
o $756.02 (Family of 4*)/$233.29 (Individual**) Monthly Premium

• Basic Blue:
o $5,000,000.00 Lifetime Benefit
o $3,000.00 (Family of 4*)/$1,000.00 (Individual**) Out of Pocket Limit
o $558.10 (Family of 4*)/$172.21 (Individual**) Monthly Premium

So doing some basic math and making some assumptions, I choose to tackle the 47,000,000 uninsured people out there. Let’s assume that of that number, 15,000,000 are illegal immigrants and should be excluded, another 10,000,000 are children that could be covered under existing programs such as SCHIP, but their parents are too lazy to fill out the paper work, and another 10,000,000 are those 18 to 35 year olds that think they are indestructible and don’t need insurance. Having subtracted those 35,000,000 people from the equation we are left with 12,000,000 people that do not have access to health insurance either due to affordability, unemployment, or the transitioning from one job to another. Once again I feel the need to state that while they may not have health insurance, they are not excluded from receiving emergency healthcare.

Now if we take 12,000,000 and multiply that by the monthly cost of the Blue Choice Select individual monthly premium you get a cost of $2.8 Billion per month or $33.6 Billion per year. If you take that same number and multiply it by the monthly cost of the Basic Blue individual monthly premium you get a cost of $2.1 Billion per month or $24.8 Billion per year.