<p>Oh, and for all you people suffering and sweltering out there —</p>
<p>It’s 55 degrees & foggy where I live. I’ve got my space heater running as I type. ;)</p>
<p>BCEagle91, my hip has been bugging me. I fell out of a window onto my hip when I was a kid. The fall was only 3 ft but I fell on cement. The hip hasnt bothered me for 45 years except when it gets very cold in the winter. This is the first summer my hip has been bugging me. I am little worried that I am going to be sidelined. I am working out easy right now.</p>
<p>
In the past six years, we have had two different regular CC posters who were stunned with cancer diagnoses. Both fairly young women (45-55 age range), both were previously healthy, active & athletic; neither had any risk factors related to their diagnosis; and both were vibrant women who were not in any way ready to die and resolved to fight their cancers until their very last breath. Both chose to share their journeys with other CC’ers. Unfortunately, each was destined to lose their battles, and each passed away many years before their time – each was also fortunate enough to be financially secure and have good health insurance, but it was clear from their online journals that the financial costs they incurred in their respective fights were exorbitant. </p>
<p>If I ever though that I was “safe” because of a healthy lifestyle, reading those accounts was an eye opener. I don’t think I could hold a candle to the level of strength and energy that each of those women displayed. </p>
<p>None of us can count on our healthy lifestyles as protecting us against the high end health costs that come with a diagnosis of a serious chronic or life-threatening illness, or certainly not to protect against unforeseen accidents. Yes, it’s good for us to stay healthy and it probably does help avoid day-to-day health expenses --but none of us is immune from the really high cost stuff.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I have a chronic injury too to the lower back - an old weightlifting injury which has flared up from time to time. I used to play basketball and had to give it up because jumpers put a lot of stress on the area. It has come back every couple of years when I didn’t keep my abs muscles in good shape so I try to keep them in good enough shape so that lower back problems don’t show up again.</p>
<p>Idad has the oft-stated belief that strong core muscles and good flexibility can often alleviate hip and knee problems. You might give him a ping as to what he recommends there.</p>
<p>I had a running injury about six weeks ago. I was running about 40 miles a week and it was squeezing out core and flexibility work and that can lead to injuries. I’ve been rehabbing the knee keeping my runs down to a mile per day for a few weeks and doing a lot of strength-training during the downtime. I’m getting back to running form as the knee is in much better shape.</p>
<p>You may also have other options thanks to modern medical technology. It’s nice to know that we can replace knees, hips and put in all kinds of implants to replace, supplement or augment the existing body. A lot of things from science fiction have come to pass. I’m waiting for more abilities from the six-millon-dollar man.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>If I thought that I’d be a burden financially to my family, I’d seriously think about just doing nothing. Everyone is going to die and most of the people here should have already given some thought about that process. It might not happen for a long time but it’s getting closer and closer.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You can choose not to use the really high-cost stuff. Are you happy with the life that you’ve lived? Have you done what you’ve wanted to do in life? Have you fought the good life and are you ready to die if that was your sentence?</p>
<p>There are a lot of people that live unhealthy lifestyles or engage in practices that result in high medical costs too. Are you a cheerleader for this group?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>“Not surprisingly, employees most often complained about low wages and poor benefits. Many noted that they were paid even less than the already-low industry average for their job. Benefits, if the company provided any, were either difficult to afford or inadequate.”</p>
<p>“A common theme among many Glassdoor reviews also seems to be that the company is needlessly stingy. Low pay and paltry raises were frequent gripes, and several employees also expressed frustration about less-than-stellar health benefits. Failing to remember the last time they saw a doctor, one reviewer said, “The deductible is so high that they might as well not ever offer it.””</p>
<p>[America?s</a> Worst Companies To Work For - 24/7 Wall St.](<a href=“http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/07/19/americas-worst-companies-to-work-for-2/?Link=MKTW]America?s”>http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/07/19/americas-worst-companies-to-work-for-2/?Link=MKTW)</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I had a look at the chart of Darden and it appears that their plans to move full-time employees to part-time was around early October. Their stock went down into the middle of November but so did the S&P 500. That was the bottom for the S&P 500 but not for Darden. They had a big plunge at the beginning of Decembe r that looks earnings related and then they announced that they would be retaining their full-time employees around December 5 or December 6. Their stock price continued down into the end of December and has more or less recovered. I do think that Darden is struggling somewhat with the weak economic recovery. Those that have jobs are somewhat cautious and those without are obviously very cautious. It’s kind of a bifurcated consumer out there.</p>
<p>
If it was your spouse or your child who was diagnosed with cancer, would you suggest that to them? </p>
<p>It’s one thing to opine about what you <em>would</em> do when it hasn’t happened – quite another when you are faced with the reality.</p>
<p>I have two close friends who each lost their adult son’s to serious diseases when the young men were in their mid 30’s – one was a rare form of cancer, I don’t recall what the other young man died of – but again, no one is immune. I have another member of my extended family who is a young, healthy man in his 20’s who was diagnosed earlier this year with testicular cancer – he’ll be ok (it’s rarely fatal but does typically require the type of surgery that most men would rather not have).</p>
<p>I mean… are you going to tell the 30-something with cancer that it’s too expensive to pay for chemo, so just forget it? </p>
<p>I’ve only got a little over 5 years until I qualify for Medicare – I don’t look at ACA as being about me. I’m thinking about my son and daughter and the quality of health care they will be able to get or afford in the coming years. They are in that age category of not really needing insurance… until they do. (Both have insurance, one is in grad school full time, the other has coverage through work – but the point is, things may change for them over time).</p>
<p>BCEagle91, I was kind of talking about revenues and the info was from Darden.</p>
<p>There wasnt any talk of stock price. </p>
<p>The individual and uninsured market have been running parallel to the employee- employer healthcare market. Parallel to medicare for decades and decades </p>
<p>Obamacare is primarily addressing the individual and uninsured markets. 96 percent of firms with over 50 employees provide healthcare and they still can after Obamacare really starts. This is not the individual or uninsured market.</p>
<p>There should be very little impact in the over 50 employee market. Obamacare is not that radical. Romneycare is similar and it turns out people do want to and do buy health insurance. The uninsured rates were low in Mass before Romneycare and now they are very low. </p>
<p>There are firms that are going to play games. They should be called on it so consumers can make an educated choice with what they do with their purchasing dollars.</p>
<p>I looked at the NY rates and I would love to hear from the OP what she thinks of those rates.
I dont know what the definition of a small business is in NY but if the OP qualifies… The rates dont look horrendous. The individual market place in NY still looks pretty high to me.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I don’t know. My son knows far more about cancer than I do as that’s his area of work so he could probably make a far more informed decisions on what the options are than I could. But everything ultimately may come down to costs and the impact on the rest of the family and that extends to society. If you spend so much on cancer, you can’t spend so much on HIV or heart disease or curing Downs, Autism, Mers, hip problems, etc.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>It’s another thing to prepare for it.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I have a co-worker with a son that died in a traffic accident. He was hit by a drunk driver. My guess is that it costs a lot less to treat alcoholism than it does to treat cancer. But in MA, it seems judges are pretty lenient on DUI and it doesn’t look like they are employing the right carrots and sticks to solve this problem.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>At some point of expense, you say no. Those decisions are made by society or the market. Certainly not by me. I work in a relative microcosm with certain sets of resources and we’d have to make that decision in light of those resources.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I have a niece with a rare auto-immune disorder and she had a slew of heart surgers from shortly after she was born. She has to take expensive medications to treat the problem. Her parents are fairly well-off so that they could afford the surgeries when she was younger (he worked for a startup that didn’t work out well so he didn’t have insurance). If you have the resources, be they time, energy, property, ability to generate income, then maybe it isn’t a big problem. If not, then you have tough choices to make. I’m sure that we’ll have the same tough choices as a country. We have an NIH budget that funds lots and lots and lots of researchers. There have been cutbacks - and that means that some discoveries won’t be made that could cure some things, create treatments for some things or prevent some things. But how much do you dump into NIH? There’s a place in Cambridge, MA that has Genomic data on people with a number of problems. You can get access to the data if you are a researcher with connections to a university. There’s lots of data to analyze that could lead to a cure but there aren’t enough researchers or hardware budgets to look at that data. So we miss out on cures, treatments, preventions that could save lives or improve the quality of life for many. We make financial decisions.</p>
<p>I’d love for researchers to have infinite resource because I can see solving a lot of health problems with sufficient resources but we can’t do that.</p>
<p>"> It’s one thing to opine about what you <em>would</em> do when it hasn’t</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>It’s another thing to prepare for it."</p>
<p>You cant prepare for this. You can think you can all you want, but you just cant.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I think that it’s more accurate to say that they offer healthcare; employees do not have to choose it and I think that the statistics are that about 30% in the 20-30 age group decline employer healthcare. Are many employer healthcare plans really bad? I’m sure that there are some - I’ve read about some of them in big companies. Have you read about employee complaints that insurance, in their case, isn’t worth it?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>MA has been experiencing a healthy amount of outflow, often by middle-class families that have cheaper options in the South. This has been offset by college students moving in and staying. The result is a high-wage, high cost-of-living economy where healthcare costs may not be as big a piece of the budget as it is in lower-cost states.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>There are firms that play games now. And some of these firms are doing quite well for their owners; not so much for their workers.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Have you made out a will?</p>
<p>Do you have all of the documents in place for your survivors should anything happen to you?</p>
<p>Do you want to live forever?</p>
<p>I have two friends that committed suicide. One had a mental condition and couldn’t deal with the pain.</p>
<p>The other had an incurable illness and he didn’t want to put his wife through his decline so he took a revolver and shot himself in the head. This was a brilliant and rational guy.</p>
<p>Insurance is supposed to help make ease the families woes about treatments, but helping absorb a significant portion of the medical care costs, particularly for major medical expenses. </p>
<p>Our family has gone over the limit of our $2500/person major medical a few times, and we consider ourselves fairly healthy. It is very reassuring to us to have good major medical coverage, because those bills can be HUGE, especially if the patient is expected to pay 20% of it and the bill reaches 5-6 figures or more!</p>
<p>I think what was meant is that it is VERY tough to prepare for medical catastrophes, emotionally, financially, physically, etc. These can be devastating to the patient and family involved.</p>
<p>Making a will and getting documents in order, sharing passwords are all things that folks SHOULD do. I admit I’ve been very lax about this. Also have NOT transferred things into our trust as the estate attorney who drew up our wills instructed us to do. <sigh></sigh></p>
<p>Yeah… I dont want to diminish the pain of watching a friend go thru terrible
Illness or death.</p>
<p>When a friend died of ALS, and I was at the funeral watching his 3 boys… I could not stop crying. I have never cried so much in my entire life. My son was sitting next to me. I dont know what he was thinking. </p>
<p>Still… Not the same…</p>
<p>You cant prepare yourself psychologically for some things that occur in life. We dont know until we know. Hopefully, we never know.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>If you had the choice of bankrupting your family or dieing, what would you do?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I don’t think that’s what the others meant but in case I’m wrong, I don’t really have a problem with catastrophic insurance coverage. Insurance is meant to cover catastrophes that we can’t afford. Healthcare insurance, though, seems to be a bunch of pieces that are not catastrophes. Someone else posted on that earlier - you don’t get insurance on routine maintenance items.</p>
<p>Somebody can say no to coverage of a particular treatment or drug. It may be someone in the insurance company or elsewhere but we don’t have infinite carte blanche for treatments.</p>
<p>Those unexpected catastrophic illnesses/diseases/accidents are what insurance should be used for. People should not be relying on insurance payments to maintain/prolong unhealthy lifestyles that result in preventable illnesses and injuries, but they do, and this drives up the cost for all of us.</p>
<p>So, when I got cancer when I was a kid I should’ve chosen to die so as not to bankrupt my family? I’m sorry, but that idea is preposterous. Even for an adult, the grief over a family member “sacrificing” themselves to prevent the family from going bankrupt would be a lot more traumatic than actual bankruptcy.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Did you bankrupt your family?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Logically one would have to take into account that the family could be in bankruptcy and the family member dies.</p>
<p>We make these decisions as families and as society. There are costs to everything and we have to decide what we want to spend our money on, even if those decisions result in deaths.</p>
<p>My idea of “preparation” is buying insurance. I have a life insurance policy; I have homeowner’s insurance; I have auto insurance; I have long term care insurance; and I have health insurance. The premiums are affordable and the rates stable on each of those types of insurance except for the health insurance, which just goes up and up year after year. </p>
<p>I certainly wouldn’t want to have unlimited money spent to simply preserve a low-quality life for me (for example, to sustain my life on a ventilator while I was comatose). I do have a “living will” as well as a regular will and have discussed its provisions with my kids. </p>
<p>But all serious (expensive) diseases are not fatal – many are chronic and require expensive medications or surgical interventions, but sufferers can still enjoy a long and rewarding life. Many cancer survivors really are survivors – they had surgery, they had treatment, and their cancer was eliminated and they may have long and productive lives, without any recurrence. So you can’t look at medical expenses as something you will just forego of it seems to pricey at the time.</p>
<p>I have pet insurance for each of my two dogs. It covers up to $20,000 per incident. My dogs are pound rescues – I bought the insurance because I am fond of the dogs and I don’t want to have to face the decision of putting a dog down because I can’t afford the vet bill. So I bought insurance to take money out of the decision. </p>
<p>I think people are a whole lot more important than dogs. I don’t think that anyone can really make that “live or die” decision for a human being based simply on finances. Quality of life? Yes. But money? No.</p>
<p>^agree, I like your perspective calmom.</p>
<p>relevant article in NYT magazine, poignant and insightful as the couple involved have their own beliefs tested by a real life “live or die” situation.</p>
<p><a href=“A Life-or-Death Situation - The New York Times”>A Life-or-Death Situation - The New York Times;
<p>I see. So as a nine year old, I should’ve been like, “Mommy, don’t bring me to the hospital to get treatment. Just let me die in my room. I don’t want you to pay medical bills to save me.” Makes -perfect- sense. And by perfect I mean no sense. You can lose money, but losing a family member to an illness like cancer is devastating.</p>