Suddenly Without Insurance Coverage

From January 1979 to June 2005 I had been covered by a health insurance plan of one type or another. My insurance covered the birth of my three children, doctor visits, surgeries, illnesses, medicine, emergency room visits, everything. In 2005 I was unexpectedly laid off from a job I had for nearly eight years. I thought hard about not having any insurance coverage for my two high school children. We were very healthy people and hadn't seen our primary care doctors for over two years. But what if we had to go to the emergency room?

Regardless of not having insurance coverage, I decided not to look for another office job and to go the self employment route. Although I earned enough money working at home to live comfortably, there was never enough money to pay for health insurance. If one of us got sick, we went to a walk-in clinic to see a doctor. The cost of the visit was only about a fourth of the cost of what a monthly insurance premium payment would have cost. Some of the prescriptions, though, were pricey. I pay for everything with cash and the prescriptions one doctor wrote me came to $350. I was embarrassed, but I had to go back to his office and ask him to change the prescriptions to cheaper drugs or give me samples if he had them.

My daughter develops a soft, mushy lump on her belly. The doctor at the walk-in clinic diagnosed a hernia. She didn't need surgery at that time, but would eventually need to. I felt bad because I couldn't afford to do anything about it.

Now my daughter has a good job with good health insurance coverage. After her primary doctor confirmed the hernia, he sent her to a specialist. Her specialist scheduled her for day surgery and the hernia was repaired with no problems.

She started to get those statements in the mail that say, "This is not a bill." Showed the doctor charges and the breakdown of every procedure from signing in to the surgery floor to the room she was prepped in to the room she recovered in to the pain medicine she was given. Altogether, everything came to over $15,000, but her out-of-pocket co-pays only came to $140. Without insurance coverage, she would still have that hernia because we would never be able to pay out of pocket for surgery like that.