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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious about why it wasn’t considered to switch insurers, the article has do many details on many processes and I felt this one was not investigated

It’s definitely hard to cancel them and the expense adds up to pay premiums for two

Was it a possibility?

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I obviously don’t know the specifics, but US healthcare plans only let you change during specific enrollment periods or qualifying life events. It’s possible he wasn’t able to.

Additionally, it sounds like he picked what appeared to be the best rated plan available to him on the market. Others may have been even worse or prohibitively expensive.

Yes I know it’s hard to cancel outside of enrollment periods, you can still have multiple

Adding in the last minute flights and commitments throughout this article, I would say for other people that at some point the calculus can be re-evaluated to find that paying the premiums would be worth it. The loved ones can pay for that instead of last minute flights and time off

The man in the article was living in a studio apartment. I doubt he was in a position to be paying the equivalent of a mortgage for many insurance options. Even if he could, I’m not sure that’s the system/solution we’d want.

> you can still have multiple

This can’t be for real. The only reason you pay for insurance is in case something happens. It has no value outside of that. That’s why it’s called insurance. And medical insurance in the US is very expensive, so much that a large part of the population can’t afford it. If you don’t get care when you need it, it’s worse than no insurance - now there’s less money left to pay out of pocket to the only places that will take you on in time. The solution to being scammed is not to sign up for another scam.

Aside from how ridiculous it would be to buy double coverage, it can just make the problem worse with both companies trying to argue they aren't the primary and that their doing anything may be duplication of coverage. But some more paper work should resolve that once you are dead.

Blame literally anything except the glaringly obvious perverse incentives produced by the profit motive.

Glad we have folks willing to do the hard work of defending negligent insurance companies <3

> I would say for other people

It wasn't blame and I wrote that specifically for that reason

Nobody is struggling with the problem of delivering good healthcare to people with tons of money. Yeah, you just pay more money.

If he had a lot of money he could have just paid out of pocket for care. It sounds like he couldn’t afford it.

You have the choice of a couple of large companies that will deny every claim always for any reason, and a few smaller players who no doctor in your area has heard of or can accept payment from.

So yeah, you have a 'choice'

Or pay cash for therapy. Or have the parent pay cash for therapy. Options existed, but there are none now.

Most therapists don’t accept insurance. The problem then is that their services are expensive out-of-pocket.

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