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Just to keep Forbes honest, I went ahead and clicked on their e-insurance link and looked up the costs for health insurance for our hypothetical 25 year-old man. Surprise! Of 29 companies on the site, only one had a premium as low as $93.00 listed. Forbes craftily used the MEDIAN number for figuring out the costs of private insurance, rather than the mean or the average which would have shown a higher and truer picture.
The Median is the 'middle value' in your list.
Find the Median of: 8, 3, 44, 17, 12, 6 (Even amount of numbers)
Line up your numbers: 3, 6, 8, 12, 17, 44
Add the 2 middles numbers and divide by 2: 8 12 = 20 ÷ 2 = 10
The Median is 10.
The average is 15.
This is called how to lie with statistics and Forbes seems to be doing a very good job with this technique.
Their article is bunk for an uneducated public.
Median is usually regarded as a better or more representative - truer, if you will - statistic.
Mean (or 'average') is often skewed by one or more outliers which are not representative of the overall sample:20,25,30,35,390 = 100 mean (average)
The problem with the numbers in this article is that it doesn't give any figures for what the rates are NOW. It talks about these percentage increases w/o telling us the base.
The problem with the numbers in this article is that it doesn't give any figures for what the rates are NOW. It talks about these percentage increases w/o telling us the base.
Apparently, they also didn't take into account what a person would actually pay. The methodology the original author used is completely bogus.
He should have went all the way and made medical care paid for for every legal citizen, employed or not, while regulation the costs of hospital care, like most other first world nations have done. This half measure only make things more expensive in the end.
Simple procedures cost 4 to sometimes 10 times more than they should. Preventive medicine such as angiograms should be inexpensively and readily available like in other countries. It's no surprise so many people get heart attacks when all they do is an EKG and a stress test and think that's 'good enough' to rule out problems. Every adult should get an angiogram or at least have the option of having one done starting at age 30, every 5 years thereafter, the rest of their lives. They should also have post meal blood sugar testing done on a semi regular basis. Heart disease and diabetes are the number one killers, and undiagnosed blood sugar problems cause a lot of this country's health problems. High blood sugar is more dangerous than smoking.
Here's a little thing about supply and demand for you... these expensive hospital machines sit down most of the time.. the more people that would be tested, the faster the machines would pay themselves off, and the less they would need to charge to begin with...
Blue Shield of CA notified me 2 weeks ago that beginning January 2014, my monthly premium would increase 48%, my deductible will go from $3,500 to $6,000, and my co-pays would raise from 20% to 40%.
Keep in mind, that without the ACA (or Obamacare, if you prefer), that the individual health plans would be inaccessible to people with pre-existing conditions. The cost of insuring individuals with pre-existing conditions is more expensive than those without and this is the reason the cost of health insurance has risen.
To give you an example, I have epilepsy (a condition that is very often, and in my case is, unpreventable). Without health insurance I cannot drive or work. Yet, epilepsy is a pre-existing condition that will forbid me from buying health insurance absent a law (such as the ACA) that prevents such discrimination in the health insurance market.
Well, sure, there is always some good in everything, IF you look hard enough and wait long enough.
Just as there is SOME good in 40 tons of cow manure, ( Eventually, it will be great fertilizer), so, too, is there some good in obamacare, for a few people at the expense of the majority of people.
Remember TANSTAAFL? There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch?
SOMEBODY will pay the bill, sooner or later, and the insurance company will ALWAYS make a profit. ALWAYS! Their stockholders DEMAND it!
YOU may very well be one of those stockholders!
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