Well, good for you. Some people do have ball cancer and don’t have $644 to confirm it.
It sucks. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
And there’s a lot of people who have to live with ball cancer because even if they could afford to confirm it, they couldn’t afford to treat it. And that’s a decision people make every damn day.
Hell, I have a well-paying job and decent insurance and I still have to decide when my kids cough is bad enough to merit a sick visit to his pedi knowing that it’ll cost $250.
One of my kids had an ear infection right before his annual well visit (which is covered). They did his hearing screening as part of the well visit and it was covered, but he failed due to sinus congestion left over from the cold.
So we came back for a re-test. Still congested, still failed. Come back again in a couple weeks.
Couple weeks later we come back and he passes.
Few more weeks later we received bills for $250 for each of the followup hearing tests.
My youngest child needs speech therapy because he’s nonverbal and should be stringing full sentences together by now. Speech therapy is entirely coinsurance based so I have to pay $95/appt until I reach the $2000 deductible then I’ll be paying ~$20/appt
These appointments are biweekly and started in November. I had a long conversation with both insurance and the therapy office to clarify my options. I found out the therapy office charges only $65/appt if you don’t go through insurance, reduced the appointments to weekly, while reducing all other spending I could to stretch it out, then come end of the year (open enrollment) I maxed out the flexible spending account at $3k for the year and verified the new year didnt drastically change the insurance coverage. I still had to lean on wealthier family to help me pay for everything but pretty soon we should hit the deductible and it’ll (hopefully) be smooth sailing from there.
I’m also thinking I should setup a HSA and toss some of the tax return in there when that arrives as another line of defence. My wife tends to treat our checking account as the “available budget” so I’ve taken to shuffling money into various other accounts as that’s far easier than fighting to get her to manage money better
Well, good for you. Some people do have ball cancer and don’t have $644 to confirm it.
It sucks. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
And there’s a lot of people who have to live with ball cancer because even if they could afford to confirm it, they couldn’t afford to treat it. And that’s a decision people make every damn day.
Hell, I have a well-paying job and decent insurance and I still have to decide when my kids cough is bad enough to merit a sick visit to his pedi knowing that it’ll cost $250.
One of my kids had an ear infection right before his annual well visit (which is covered). They did his hearing screening as part of the well visit and it was covered, but he failed due to sinus congestion left over from the cold.
So we came back for a re-test. Still congested, still failed. Come back again in a couple weeks.
Couple weeks later we come back and he passes.
Few more weeks later we received bills for $250 for each of the followup hearing tests.
The whole system is fucked.
My youngest child needs speech therapy because he’s nonverbal and should be stringing full sentences together by now. Speech therapy is entirely coinsurance based so I have to pay $95/appt until I reach the $2000 deductible then I’ll be paying ~$20/appt
These appointments are biweekly and started in November. I had a long conversation with both insurance and the therapy office to clarify my options. I found out the therapy office charges only $65/appt if you don’t go through insurance, reduced the appointments to weekly, while reducing all other spending I could to stretch it out, then come end of the year (open enrollment) I maxed out the flexible spending account at $3k for the year and verified the new year didnt drastically change the insurance coverage. I still had to lean on wealthier family to help me pay for everything but pretty soon we should hit the deductible and it’ll (hopefully) be smooth sailing from there.
I’m also thinking I should setup a HSA and toss some of the tax return in there when that arrives as another line of defence. My wife tends to treat our checking account as the “available budget” so I’ve taken to shuffling money into various other accounts as that’s far easier than fighting to get her to manage money better