Not-So-Slacker Insurance I: How I Learned to Start Worrying…
by Christine
After reading yesterday’s post on adultlets and insurance, I couldn’t resist chiming in. I just turned 32 last week, so even though I don’t qualify as an adultlet anymore, even by the most generous standards, I am certifiably Generation X enough to share my (hopefully still relevant) experiences in navigating the post-college world of health insurance.
Rude Awakening
My childhood home was only a 10-15 minute drive from a Kaiser Permanente complex, so I grew up thinking that every time a person got sick, all they had to do was drive to the nearest Kaiser, flash their membership card, and pay (what was then) $5. College only continued the misconception as I went to a private university that covered services at the student health care center. (The pathetic irony being that, for a time there, I was even a pre-medical student!)
So imagine my dismay when, during the first week of my brand-new, high-paying tech job (remember, this was 1998) I was confronted with a stack of applications, benefit plan guidebooks and comparison charts filled with jargon about deductibles, maximum lifetime payouts, coinsurance, pre-existing conditions, cafeteria plans and claims processes. I now feel sorry for the HR employee who had to sit through my barrage of questions and patiently explain to me, a newly-minted college graduate, “how health insurance works.”
In Sickness and In Health…
Flash forward a few years later to my next adult milestone: getting married. Here’s a little known fact about my husband and me (and hopefully my mother won’t kill me when she finds out) - we were already legally married by the time our wedding took place. And no, we didn’t do it because we were so impatiently in love we had to elope…and no, there wasn’t a little one on the way to necessitate it either. Two words: open enrollment.
At the time, I was downshifting from tech and working for a museum with no decent health plan. My COBRA was about to run out, which was conveniently happening right around the time of my fiance’s open enrollment period at his job. Our wedding was still months away, and because I didn’t want to “go naked” and risk not getting coverage for a minor pre-existing condition under his plan, we decided to be practical and go to city hall.
Apparently, we are not alone in this. According to a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation (funny coincidence there), 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.
Our First HSA
We didn’t get to enjoy the benefits for all that long, however, as about 2 years into our marriage, my husband and I decided we wanted to take off some time and travel around the world. We looked into getting COBRA and were completely staggered at the cost - more than $800 a month to cover the both of us!
So we started looking into purchasing our own health insurance and learned about this new-fangled thing (it was mid-2004) called a Health Savings Account. Sure we knew you had to have a really high deductible and could sock away pre-tax dollars and all that, but to be perfectly honest, the reason why the HSA-linked plan got our attention was the low insurance premium. Less than $200 a month!
And here’s where that “I’m young and invincible” attitude actually worked in our favor. We figured, we’re young and healthy enough right now that we’ll won’t need to actually use the insurance unless something really bad happens. So we went for it and got the HSA.
It was only after talking with Uncle Richard a year later that we realized the extent of the pre-tax benefits and the tax-deferred growth of the plan we had chosen. By that point, it was all gravy.
