They force us to get health insurance. We pay for the health insurance thinking that if something happens at least we won’t have to foot the whole bill ourselves. This makes it a little easier to justify paying the premiums every month, right? If you pay a every month your covered if the something happens, right? Well, partially.
I don’t know about all insurance companies but I have found out that Medicare only pays for a certain amount of days in the hospital per year. Think about that for a second. Medicare is suppose to be for the elderly and disabled. The people that are more likely to have a long hospital stay and they limit how many days they will pay.
Medicare only pays for 100 days in the hospital per year and an extra 60 days to use up in your lifetime over the hundred days. Chris is now at 189 days this hospital stay. That’s not including the days he spent in January of 2023. This means that he has been listed as self pay for all the days after the first 160 days.
We have not received a bill yet, but I’m sure when we do I will need a doctor for the heart attack I’m going to have. He does not have a secondary insurance due to him having previous medical conditions. Trying to get him a secondary insurance is a nightmare. They jack the monthly premiums up so much that no one can afford it.
We paid for him to have insurance through the market place before he qualified for Medicare. It cost us $553 every month and didn’t cover very much of his medical expenses. Once he qualified for Medicare we dropped the market place insurance thinking he was covered with better insurance for a lower premium. I can’t say we were completely wrong but we was not completely right either.
Just a word of advice: check on your insurance policy and know what is and is not covered. If you have insurance through your work place; that’s great, but make sure you have another insurance too. What happens if you have an illness that causes you to no longer be able to work? Your insurance is dropped or you pay extra to keep it. In Chris’s case is was a lot more than a little extra to keep the insurance he had when he was working!
Go check your policies and know how many hospital days they cover so you know if you need to get coverage from another company before the worse happens. It’s not a bad idea to have a secondary insurance just in case something happens. We never know what’s going to happen and once it does its too late!
-Lori Hulett