@NJres --that was super helpful, thanks. I don’t know details of SIL’s income, but this payment would be a LOT more than 10%, i’m pretty sure. D not planning on going back to her job, though may look into work-from-home stuff. Nothing lined up yet. I’ll just pass on any information as asked. Appreciate the answers here.
Read @NJres 's link carefully. The payment for your son-in-law only has to be over ~10% of the family income in order for anyone in the family to be eligible for ACA subsidies. The cost of the plan for your daughter and the baby is irrelevant to this calculation.
BTW the fastest way to look up ACA rates is probably Health Sherpa: https://www.healthsherpa.com/
Access Health CT just sent an email saying they have extended the enrollment deadline to Jan 15th, and already have enrollment fairs scheduled in Jan. I did not know that states could extend the enrollment deadline past Dec 15th.
I just found out a few days ago that New York state (where one of my daughters lives) has a later enrollment deadline. It’s one of about 10 states that have later deadlines.
California’s deadline is January 15th too. But people need to sign up by today to get covered in January.
@“Cardinal Fang” yeah I realized that when I read more carefully. So they won’t qualify for a subsidy, but they’ll be paying something like 20% of their income for insurance. Sigh.
Also thanks for that link!
They even have a name for it: “The family glitch”
(All of these answered questions coming from the same website)
@garland my kid WITH a subsidy pays about one months earnings to pay for health insurance…and that’s for one…not two. So 1/12…that’s a lot for 1 person.
So happy to be living in this great country with such a bad health care system. To lower the cost, I think we need to lower medical liability, more doctors and nurses. My kid had a minor surgery to remove ganglion cyst from his hand, and the bill was close to $40K from the outpatient hospital affiliated with a major hospital even though one year ago, I got an estimate from another private specialist who said he charges around $7K even if we paid everything ourselves. Of course, the $40K was their bill to the health insurance, which in all likelihood will probably pay around $10K ~ 15K. I have no idea how that billing and discount process works.
Good thing my kid has his health insurance form his school which covered everything except $250. He said he freaked out when he saw the bill.
yeah. I just don’t know how they’re going to do one fifth. I mean, they will but it’s nuts.
Most families will be working very hard to pay for health care, which in turn will worsen their health condition. A vicious circle.
Additionally, because folks will look to save money by choosing high deductible plans they will hesitate to go to the doctor when needed.
Plus with no penalty for not signing up any longer, some people won’t seek healthcare until things are serious. We’ll all be paying for that burden.
If you’re not paying a lot for health insurance, someone - your employer or the government - is subsidizing your cost. There are lots of systemic issues.
“This year, the average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance is $6,896 for individual plans and $19,616 for family plans, according to a new survey of businesses released by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a 47 percent increase for single plans and a 55 percent rise for family plans compared with 2008.”
In terms of relative costs, how do medical malpractice insurance costs compared to the costs of servicing medical school student loans?
In terms of more providers, physician supply is constrained by medical school and medical residency spaces. In the US, the cost of education and training for a physician is very expensive, so it either has to be heavily subsidized or put on the physician as student loan debt burden. Nursing is also school capacity constrained, as evidenced by how competitive spaces in nursing programs are. Of course, when providers are supply-constrained and burdened with the debt from high cost of education and training, it should not be surprising that they charge a lot.
Was the more expensive provider somehow better?
No.
Malpractice insurance amounts to chump change in the big scheme of things. What does run up total costs is defensive medicine – ordering unnecessary and/or repetitive tests, prescribing unnecessary Rx to make the patients feel better…
and, btw, despite popular press, med school debt really doesn’t impact choice of high/low paying specialities.
“…another private specialist who said he charges around $7K” That sounds like what he charges. Not the full bill including the facility.
But a discussion of what’s behind costs risks distracting this thread and the questions of others. Just saying.
It’s really, really disturbing how much of an outlier the US healthcare system is. The most expensive and the worst. Every time I think about a return to the States, I think of healthcare and sigh.
That was the sticker price. But very few people pay the sticker price. Your son’s insurance company certainly did not.