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Gambling With Insurance

Right now at work, my health insurance is $12 per paycheck, or $24/month.  I don’t know the full details of it, other than it has a $500 deductible, but when I signed up for it my parents said that was an extremely good deal.  With the merger that my work is going through, we’re unfortunately going to lose our awesome policy and be forced to go with the company that the other office has been using.

With the change, the deductible is going to be $1000 and the number that is floating around right now is about $150-200/mo for the policy.  Since everyone would be seeing a decrease in take-home pay, everyone will receive a raise to cover this initial jump in cost, but any increase each year after that is normally felt in the insurance market would just have to be soaked up by the employee.  Not to mention that everyone in our office would be considered out of network, so our coverage wouldn’t be as good or would cost us more if we were to go to the doctor.

Monday we’re having a meeting to discuss the new policies, and I assume have the opportunity to sign up for them.  I’ve lived most of my life, probably around 20 years, without any health insurance at all.  For the few years that I’ve had it at work, I’ve used it none.  So the dilemma that I’m now staring at is whether I should A) take the raise that I’m supposed to be getting and just pass it off to the insurance company to basically stay where I’m at now B) drop having insurance altogether and save the raise, or even C) just signing up through another company for a policy that is cheap and has some outrageous deductible like $5k or $10k, just in case, heaven forbid, something were to happen I wouldn’t be SOL and save the remainder of the raise.