If you are healthy, the cheapest thing to do is an HSA + high-deductible health plan. I've been on an individual plan I found at http://www.ehealthinsurance.com for a few years. Remember to price shop your plan every couple of years as you can usually save 25% or so by switching to a different plan (even with the same company).
At least in the US, the way "health insurance" works nowadays, it's not really "insurance" in the true sense of the word. From Wikipedia:
"Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss."
Problem is, most people think health insurance should pay ALL of their medical bills. This is why health costs rise so much in the US. People think health care is "free" because insurance pays for it. So individuals consume health services without regard for the true costs and that punishes everyone. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.
An HSA plan + high-deductible health insurance gets back to how things should be; you have health insurance to protect you from a loss you can't absorb individually. But you still pay for routine & predictable care yourself, with your own money. It's cheaper for you, and better for everybody.
Plus, with an HSA, all of your "routine" expenses are TAX FREE!
People think of 'health insurance' as a 'medical services subscription'. Why can't we just market it as such then? Alot less bullshit involved that way.
Because healthy young people wouldn't buy the subscription, and the risk pool would be flooded with high-risk people, and the system would fail. Wikipedia: "adverse selection".
There's also no such thing as a free lunch (which is why dental insurance sucks) --- if you know you're going to incur an expense, and your provider knows you're going to incur an expense, nobody is going to "insure" you out of it; you're going to pay one way or the other.
To someone making ten dollars an hour, a 2000 dollar medical expense is devastating.
The problem I have is that I have seen people with this same health insurance end up 50k or more in debt and worse because the provider fights you at every turn. At that point, is it health insurance?
Finally, going for preventative care saves more money than it costs for a provider. Having someone see a high cholesterol number and adjust diet and such is much cheaper than a heart attack a few years down the road. For the provider, it makes sense for them to cover basic health expenditures because it stops much bigger ones down the road.
First of all, I would argue that $2000 is not irreversibly devastating. One could pay it back over a couple of years. Secondly, as another poster said, one should be contributing to an HSA, saving in anticipation of such an expense. Thus in all but the rarest of cases most of the money should be already available in such a situation.
I do agree that fighting insurance companies is a problem. Perhaps the government should require insurance companies to electronically code their policies so that you can get instant pre-approval for medical care on site, with steep fines to insurance companies for reneging on payment for pre-approved procedures.
As a society, we need to do everything we can to reduce the transaction costs of accessing health care. I'll bet that 15-20% or more of health costs are administrative, which is ridiculous.
Finally, many HSA plans realize that preventive care is important and provide "first dollar" coverage for preventive care, meaning the plan pays for it, not you (via your HSA account). See: http://www.ahip.org/content/pressrelease.aspx?docid=21554
Many providers do cover preventative care for this reason.
This is, IIRC, one of the problems in free-health-for-all places like Canada. You can get your bypass, but it may not happen until /after/ the heart attack it was supposed to prevent.
At least in the US, the way "health insurance" works nowadays, it's not really "insurance" in the true sense of the word. From Wikipedia:
"Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss."
Problem is, most people think health insurance should pay ALL of their medical bills. This is why health costs rise so much in the US. People think health care is "free" because insurance pays for it. So individuals consume health services without regard for the true costs and that punishes everyone. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.
An HSA plan + high-deductible health insurance gets back to how things should be; you have health insurance to protect you from a loss you can't absorb individually. But you still pay for routine & predictable care yourself, with your own money. It's cheaper for you, and better for everybody.
Plus, with an HSA, all of your "routine" expenses are TAX FREE!