[JohnFen]

If you get a very serious and expensive problem, insurance may not help nearly as much as you'd think. My mother had great insurance, but when she got cancer, the insurance didn't stop her from getting absolutely destroyed by the medical bills (not to mention having to constantly fight with the insurance company while being extremely ill).

It drove her to bankruptcy anyway. In hindsight, she commented that had she known that the insurance wouldn't be all that helpful, she would have just saved up all the money she poured into premiums over the decades.

[angmarsbane]

I feel the constant fighting with insurance isn't spoken to enough. I don't want insurance because I don't want to be both a billing department and a sick person. We went through the same mess when both of my parents were sick. We were already taking in an enormous amount of new information about their illnesses and then we were also having to try and learn how their insurance worked, what was covered, what wasn't, trying to vet what would happen in every appointment, which doctors would show up (bc what if one of the doctors is out-of-network), duking it out with insuance over prior authorizations, trying to tie each bill that came in to something that happened months ago and then vetting if the bill was correctly billed, correctly covered by insurance etc, and on and on and on. I'd rather have 0 insurance and just negotiate each bill as it came in with one single entity, the hospital.

[JohnFen]

Absolutely.

A comment about this, though:

> I'd rather have 0 insurance and just negotiate each bill as it came in with one single entity, the hospital.

That's not how it works, insurance or not. You won't get just one bill from a single entity, you'll get many bills from many different entities and will have to negotiate with each separately.

[jrs235]

And getting bills 6 to 18 months after the date of services!