| It really depends. Consider: 1. How many assets do you have to protect? Houses, investments, a business. If you have a bit of those, then insurance is good protection against losing them if you get sick for some reason. 2. Are you young with a good health history? Rolling the dice, you are probably low risk and won’t need much in the near future. But it is definitely a dice roll. 3. Hospitals charge more to uninsured than they charge insured. This is because uninsured typically don’t pay and are harder to collect from, so treatment goes up. 4. Likewise, if you don’t pay or they suspect you won’t pay, they don’t have to do a lot of things: just stabilize and release. Got cancer? Well, charity care doesn’t really include that specialist that might save your life. 5. Medical tourism might work if you are open to going to Thailand or India if you get anything serious. Problem is you probably won’t be able to get there for anything emergency. 6. Insurance for individuals (as opposed to group plans) really sucks: it is more expensive (people who don’t get insurance from work are higher risk), it isn’t very tax deductible (employers get a tax break on giving insurance to their employees). It is almost a bad deal, so I get why people would hesitate about it. |