Health insurance is stopping us

[2gypsies]

Here is an article that may steer you.... although it's a little outdated - talking about 2019 ACA enrollment.

You may want to look into some of the articles given by Xscapers - the 'younger' group of Escapees.

https://wheelingit.us/2018/11/02/pre-medicare-us-rvers-time-to-think-about-health-insurance-for-2019/

Sorry it went off-track for you... many posts do.  Don't give up on us!!!

[ToddF]

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as "catastropic health coverage". It certainly wouldn't fall under one of the options available through the ACA. And the "new" administration's short term plans are the opposite of catastrophic coverage. They are indemnity policies with very limited payouts.

[richfaa]

The U.S. spends more on health care as a share of the economy — nearly twice as much as the average OECD country — yet has the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the 11 nations. The U.S. has the highest chronic disease burden and an obesity rate that is two times higher than the OECD average.Jan 30, 2020.

 

What country has the best healthcare system?

The U.S. ranks 15th.

• No. 8: Australia. ...
• No. 7: Japan. ...
• No. 6: United Kingdom. ...
• No. 5: Germany. Best Health Care System Rank: 5. ...
• No. 4: Norway. Best Health Care System Rank: 4. ...
• No. 3: Sweden. Best Health Care System Rank: 3. ...
• No. 2: Denmark. Best Health Care System Rank: 2. ...
• No. 1: Canada. Best Health Care System Rank: 1.

More items...

•

Jan 21, 2020

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by richfaa

[Blues]

5 hours ago, Zulu said:

You were perfectly clear. Since most forum members here know about Medicare but next to nothing about pre-Medicare coverage, that's what they talk about -- Medicare.

Just look at the three posts that came right after your above post -- all Medicare related. You were totally ignored. This thread was hijacked starting from just the 3rd post.

Actually, the original post mentioned the high cost of a Medicare supplement in addition to the high cost of coverage for someone who won't be 65 for a couple of years.  Nobody is more annoyed than I am when threads that are very specific that they are about only pre-65 health insurance invariably get hijacked into Medicare advice, but this really isn't one of them. 

 

5 hours ago, Zulu said:

OP, besides the link in Blues previous post, also try this Escapee-sponsored site Health Insurance for RVers which offers options other than the ACA . . . just investigate each option fully.

The discussion I provided a link to upthread actually began as a question about the Escapee-sponsored RVer Insurance Exchange that you're linking to.  I would suggest that anyone considering working with them read this thread from the beginning:

https://www.rvnetwork.com/topic/138198-rver-insurance-exchange-health-insurance

There was a guy who specifically wanted major medical insurance (he and his wife were starting a family) and spoke with two agents at RVer Insurance Exchange and was going to buy a policy from them.  He decided to check into the reputation of the company he was going to get a policy with, and posted to this thread about it.  He didn't get any responses about the company's reputation, but I took the time to look into the company he asked about and realized that they don't offer the major medical coverage he was trying to buy, and that he thought he was getting.  It was an indemnity plan. 

So even after he talked to two agents at RVer Insurance Exchange, the plan they were selling him wasn't the major medical coverage he said he wanted, and the only way he found out was by asking a somewhat unrelated question on some random message board and having some random person decide to check into it. 

My advice would be to be very careful in dealing with RVer Insurance Exchange.  Or any agent, really, since steering people to indemnity plans when they actually want (and think they're getting) major medical insurance is very common. 

The problem is that an indemnity plan might actually be a good idea for someone (although these plans were never designed to substitute for major medical, but instead to supplement it, to help with big copays or deductibles or to provide money when unable to work due to illness).  But all too often, what they actually are is not made clear by the person selling them.

You could say caveat emptor, but health insurance is so incredibly complex that the average person is reasonable to rely on someone else's advice.  The problem is that the people who offer advice (agents) are also the people selling the policy.  So there's a conflict there, and there's an actual incentive for indemnity plans to be less than completely explained, or even represented as being major medical (or the equivalent of major medical) when they're not.

Jacks60, it's not that people are ignoring you.  It's that there isn't a reasonably priced solution for traveling fulltimers who want major medical coverage but either don't qualify for a subsidy or won't/can't/don't domicile in a state where there are appropriate subsidized plans they can sign up for (i.e., provide access to a nationwide network of providers).  The guy who almost bought an indemnity plan without knowing it said he was just going to squeeze health insurance premiums into the budget (they went with his wife's employer's plan, so I'm not sure he was even traveling, which would add another layer of complexity to the situation).

You can look into alternatives like indemnity plans, or short-term medical plans, but you need to really understand exactly what it is you're buying, and you should know that most (all?) of them won't be issued to people with pre-existing conditions.  I don't know whether arthritis would disqualify you, but I do know of a person who many years ago was turned down by Blue Cross because of wearing hearing aids.  The person was in perfect health otherwise, and asked Blue Cross if they could issue a policy that doesn't cover any hearing-related treatment, and was told no--they wouldn't issue a policy at all.  So they were deemed uninsurable because of using hearing aids. 

As for catastrophic policies, the ones that Obamacare offers on the exchange are available only to people under 30.  And their hallmark is that they have "very high deductibles," which for 2020 is $8,150, which actually isn't all that high these days.

The bottom line is that I would say that most pre-Medicare traveling fulltimers domicile in Florida and get a Florida Blue EPO plan because those plans provide access to a nationwide.  Or it does right now, anyway.  Who knows what will happen next year.  You probably weren't paying attention back then, but a few years ago Blue Cross offered PPO plans in Texas that had access to a nationwide network, and then suddenly stopped, leaving the pre-Medicare Escapees Livingston-address fulltimers scrambling.

Another option is to get a less expensive plan that is an HMO and has only a local network and plan to be back in its area if you need to see a doctor, and use it elsewhere only in emergencies.  My issue with that is what determines when the "emergency" is over, and you're then uninsured unless you go back to your HMO area.  And it's still probably not going to be cheap.

A final option, that I know very little about, would be to use COBRA for insurance.  I don't know what kind of insurance you have now, but maybe with some crafty timing you can start COBRA 18 months before you hit 65.  That would be only a year out if you're now 2-1/2 years from Medicare. 

However, I glanced at something that indicated that if the person retiring became eligible for Medicare within 18 months before retirement, COBRA can be extended for the spouse for as much as 36 months.  If your husband is the one with insurance and he retires right after he turns 65, then it sounds like you could use COBRA for the full period until you reach 65. 

As I said, I know very little about COBRA but is sounds like something you could look into.  Of course, COBRA insurance tends to be expensive (I think you have to pay both your employer's portion and your portion of the premium), so it could be a non-starter, but you never know.  Also, you'd want to be sure that the policy would cover you as you travel.

[Jaydrvr]

7 hours ago, richfaa said:

The U.S. spends more on health care as a share of the economy — nearly twice as much as the average OECD country — yet has the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the 11 nations. The U.S. has the highest chronic disease burden and an obesity rate that is two times higher than the OECD average.Jan 30, 2020.

 

What country has the best healthcare system?

The U.S. ranks 15th.

• No. 8: Australia. ...
• No. 7: Japan. ...
• No. 6: United Kingdom. ...
• No. 5: Germany. Best Health Care System Rank: 5. ...
• No. 4: Norway. Best Health Care System Rank: 4. ...
• No. 3: Sweden. Best Health Care System Rank: 3. ...
• No. 2: Denmark. Best Health Care System Rank: 2. ...
• No. 1: Canada. Best Health Care System Rank: 1.

More items...

•

Jan 21, 2020

 

 

 

I'm sorry, but that just looks like your everyday click bait to me. It's just a survey, so I don't see any kind of rational analysis involved. Are the respondents just saying they like their preferred country's health care because it's free? Or, what parameters are they basing their preferences on? I'm not sure and I can't tell. I'm certainly not clicking through to find out. Hmm.. Jay

Edited September 24, 2020 by Jaydrvr

[Blues]

20 minutes ago, richfaa said:

What country has the best healthcare system?

The U.S. ranks 15th.

I'm skeptical of US News rankings like this.  In this case, it says, "The survey is based on a study that surveyed more than 200,000 global citizens from four regions to assess perceptions of 73 countries on 65 different metrics."  People's perceptions.  Frankly, I'm surprised that the U.S. is as high as 15th, unless they were asking people who have $0 premium and $0 deductible Obamacare policies and don't realize why, never mind that not everybody gets that.  And Canada is #1, despite the fact that it doesn't provide prescription drug coverage unless you're in the hospital.

Ezekiel Emanuel wrote a book called "Which Country Has the World's Best Health Care?"  I haven't read it, but I saw a great interview with him on Book TV.  He examined the health care systems in several different countries, in detail.  The problem with "best" is that different countries do different things well.  He says Australia has excellent drug coverage but falls short in other areas. 

He also has an interesting take on Taiwan's success in fighting COVID.  Taiwan could have been a disaster because of its proximity to China and all the traveling back and forth that goes on between them.  Instead, they've done great.  He credits some of their success to their health care system (which receives high satisfaction marks).  People have a health card that provides real time data about who's going to which doctor, where the doctor is located, etc.  They merged that data with data from customs and immigration, to see who'd been traveling to China, who'd been in Wuhan, who had respiratory illnesses but was not positive for influenza, and used that to suggest to doctors which patients should be tested for COVID.  They've had seven deaths. 

As for US News, they do those college rankings, and colleges have figured out how to game the system.  One example is letting people apply without paying an application fee, which means the number of applications goes way up, so the number of acceptances as a percentage of applications goes down, which makes it appear more selective.  Bleh.

[richfaa]

13 hours ago, Jaydrvr said:

I'm sorry, but that just looks like your everyday click bait to me. It's just a survey, so I don't see any kind of rational analysis involved. Are the respondents just saying they like their preferred country's health care because it's free? Or, what parameters are they basing their preferences on? I'm not sure and I can't tell. I'm certainly not clicking through to find out. Hmm.. Jay

 Ignore it and do whatever you choose to do.

[Jaydrvr]

2 minutes ago, richfaa said:

 Ignore it and do whatever you choose to do.

😄 Great idea! Works for me. Jay

[D&J]

On 9/14/2020 at 3:23 PM, Jacks60 said:

Hi everyone, Frank and I are new members and excited to learn all we can.  We would really love to take off next year when Frank can officially retire.  However, one big dilemma!

 I not old enough for Medicare, we have checked into it and paying for Medicare and the supplement is bad enough, but what it would cost for me, who is not 65 for 2 and 1/2 years yet is ridiculous!  We never expected it to be this much.  Advice from anyone who is in our situation would be so welcome.  Thank you.   

To get back to your original guesting when we first retired at 56 and 51 we had individual health plans that where high deductible plans tailored to our needs and HSA amounts to cover deductibles if needed and we were happy with them. Then after Obamacare they went away and we ended up in the unaffordable Obama nightmare, we are both on Medicare now. Now that the individual mandate is gone you should be able to find coverage with a high deductible and taylored more to your needs, it won't be cheap but nothing is anymore. Basically what we had was major medical but after the deductible we had 100% coverage including RX but guess it wasn't good enough.

Denny

[Jacks60]

Thank you Denny.  I just wanted to hear what people like yourselves did

 

[Blues]

Just an FYI about RVer Insurance Exchange--I noticed that their address has an unusual suite number, so I looked it up and it's a UPS mailbox.  That gives me pause, but I guess not everyone has actual offices any more.

But then I noticed that it's the same UPS mailbox as RV Life a/k/a Social Knowledge, LLC, the company that bought rvparkreviews.com and owns the irv2.com and rvforum.net message boards, among other things.  I'm guessing that Kyle sold his RV insurance business to them and got out.  Kyle really did start RVer Insurance Exchange as a one-man shop, and I think he may have added a couple of people as business boomed (especially after Blue Cross stopped offering PPO plans in Texas), but suffice to say, it appears that's no longer the case at RVer Insurance Exchange.

[Kirk W]

You might find the Guide For Health Insurance on the Fulltime Families website to be helpful.

[Blues]

On 9/24/2020 at 2:41 PM, Kirk W said:

You might find the Guide For Health Insurance on the Fulltime Families website to be helpful.

And here we have RVer Insurance Exchange being advertised yet again.  It is listed in the DISCOUNTS section of the Fulltime Families website, so there's some sort of relationship there (although no actual discount is listed--just advertising the name).  Perhaps that's why the site calls the agents at RVer Insurance Exchange an "awesome group of professionals" even though nowhere on any site is there any information about who the agents are; all we know is that someone on this forum reported that two of them tried to sell him an indemnity plan when he was trying to buy major medical health insurance.

Plus, the Fulltime Families site has misinformation.  It says:

Quote

Additionally, this unique company offers exclusive group health insurance coverage for self-employed RVers.

Generally, group coverage is very difficult for an individual to get because it requires an employer to be a part of the mix. However, RVer Insurance Exchange was able to pull some strings to offer this amazing opportunity to the self-employed individuals of the RV world.

Nowhere on the RVer Insurance Exchange is there anything about any sort of group health insurance plan.  A few years ago, RVer Insurance Exchange had a deal that was described this way by a poster here:

Quote

Looking back on the "nationwide PPO network" that was (is?) advertised by RVHealthInsurance, that one was a weird union-based program (you had to join the union) out of NY whose officers had been in trouble previously for forming the union solely so family members could gain access to health insurance. In that program, "access to providers nationwide" just meant they used the list of providers in a Cigna PPO, but the actual administration/claims processing was done by union management, not Cigna - a big red flag.

That was in this thread, which discussed how Escapees/RVer Insurance Exchange was selling a product that it didn't clearly identify as not being major medical health insurance (the thread title is about a similar FMCA program, but the discussion quickly turned to Escapees): https://www.rvnetwork.com/topic/131591-fmca-ppo-plan/

Also, the Fulltime Families site briefly discusses indemnity plans and short term medical plans (which they say "can work beautifully" and are "perfect" for certain situations), with not much more.  With all due respect, there's a lot more information about these types of plans in the discussions on this forum than at that website. 

In the wheelingit link above, they had short term medical plans and apparently ran into "post-claims underwriting," where the insurance company asks fairly vague questions about your medical history, and issues the policy and starts collecting premiums.  Then once you file a claim, they do the actual underwriting, where you have to present all of your medical records.  It took wheelingit nine months of constant work to get the medical records from their previous providers and have the claims for a few doctor visits paid, including being turned over to a collection agency.

Post-claims underwriting is a tactic used in short-term medical plans, which are now allowed for terms up to three years, making them look even less like short-term or temporary policies, and more like ACA-type plans.  Which they're not.  And I bet nobody selling them even remotely mentions post-claims underwriting.

The Government Accountability Office did a "secret shopper" project, where they called insurance agents, posing as people who have a pre-existing condition (like diabetes) and want health insurance. 

They made 31 calls, and of those, 21 of the agents referred them to ACA-compliant plans (the only ones that will cover pre-existing conditions).  Yay!

Of the remaining ten calls, there were misleading statements in two of them that didn't rise to the level of "deceptive marketing practices" (although they were really sketchy), and in eight of them, the GAO said the statements did rise to the level of "deceptive marketing practices," like telling the caller that his diabetes would be covered by the policy when it would not be.

If you download the actual report from the link above, you can read the details of each conversation--what the agent actually told the caller.  It's hair-raising, and no wonder the GAO referred them to the Federal Trade Commmission.  And note that one of them is a health care sharing ministry.

 The report has this disclaimer: "The results of our covert testing are illustrative only of the sales and related behaviors we experienced during the calls and are not generalizable to any specific insurance brokerage or agency, state, or the PPACA-exempt health insurance industry at large." 

But this is a really clear case--selling a product that doesn't cover pre-existing conditions to a person with a pre-existing condition--and it happened in 25% of the calls.  Imagine what the landscape is when it's a person whose health doesn't disqualify him from anything, and he's just trying to get coverage at the lowest possible cost.  Or a fulltimer who's specifically looking for major medical insurance that offers a nationwide network--something that is exceedingly rare.  If they'll tell a person with diabetes that it will be covered when it won't, imagine what they'll say in more gray areas.

Unfortunately, I just saw that Georgia is trying to prohibit its residents from using the Obamacare exchange website to look for insurance, and make them go through a broker instead.   In one of the calls by the GAO, the agent recommended an ACA plan because of the pre-existing condition, and said it included an accidental and critical illness benefit to cover the financial gap that could be created by the plan’s deductible and high out -of-pocket maximum, as well as a basic dental plan.  Turns out the ACA plan was free because of the caller's income level (subsidy), and 100% of the cost he was quoted was for coverage that was actually optional.  For the record, this was considered merely "misleading" and not serious enough for referral to the FTC. 

Good luck, Georgia residents.  And good luck, fulltimers who are looking for major medical insurance that will cover them as they travel.  The pickings are extremely slim, and the products that are advertised as alternatives need to be looked into very carefully, and statements by the people selling them need to be checked and double-checked and probably triple-checked.
 

[Zulu]

On 9/24/2020 at 1:41 PM, Kirk W said:

You might find the Guide For Health Insurance on the Fulltime Families website to be helpful.

Besides what Blues said, here's part of the Fulltime Families Website Disclaimer:

You should assume that every link on this site is an affiliate link, and that if you click on it and buy something, we could possibly make a small commission. However, you will not incur any extra charge.

You should assume that products and attractions mentioned and reviewed were obtained free or at a reduced rate [ like their Berkey Water Filter "Review" ? ] . . . The website may include advertisements, sponsored content, paid insertions, affiliate links or other forms of monetization. 

Nothing on this website should be considered professional advice. 

 

[Blues]

For the record, the links to United Healthcare and RVer Insurance Exchange on the Fulltime Families site don't appear to be affiliate links.  There's no doubt a cookie set that indicates that the visitor came from Fulltime Families, but it's not like Amazon links, which have all sorts of code that identifies the referrer so they can be paid.

I never click on a link without hovering on it first with the mouse to see if the URL has extraneous characters that indicate it's an affiliate link.

[ToddF]

This article was published in Forbes Magazine in August 2020 regarding Biden's proposal to lower the Medicare age to 60:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2020/08/13/how-kamala-harris-boosts-bidens-medicare-at-60-plan/#26dd071a6a26

Presumably there would be a premium for Part B just like there is now for those 65+. (Maybe the premium would be higher?)

I think that this could potentially ease the health insurance conundrum those of us in our late 50's or early 60's face as we try to transition into retirement.

The big problem with the current choices (as pointed out in the article) are COST and complexity. When I look at ACA options on the exchange in Minnesota, the premiums are high. The deductibles are high ($6,000 per person). Out of network (RVer) no or low benefits. Generic drugs only on many plans. Have to enroll every year (not automatic renewal).

I don't know what the Republican plan is. The Republicans are in court (Nov 2020 case is set) trying to completely eliminate ACA. Then what?

If you could solve the health insurance problem, many other problems would go away. Or at least take a step in the right  direction and work toward a better system for everyone.

Edited October 7, 2020 by ToddF
spelling

[Zulu]

39 minutes ago, ToddF said:

The Republicans are in court (Nov 2020 case is set) trying to completely eliminate ACA. Then what?

Then about 11 million Americans would no longer have health care.