Not a bad idea for health "insurance", even though

Posted on: June 27, 2017 at 07:22:31 CT

its written by a demlib.


How to ignore politics and get yourself the perfect health insurance

The answer to the health-care shenanigans going on in Washington isn’t just to call your congressmen or senators.

It’s to start taking serious financial steps to protect yourself and your family, so that even if you get the shaft from Congress, your employer and your health insurer, you can still get the care you need.

To cut to the chase, that means slowly accumulating more and more credit cards and building up your total credit line.

And it also means taking all reasonable steps to shelter any assets where they can’t be touched by creditors. That includes putting money in retirement accounts such as 401ks and IRAs, and ensuring your home is titled in the most defensive way. The rules differ from state to state, and everyone should consult some legal advice.

Yes, I am saying that in extremis you should be able and willing to pay for catastrophic health care using credit cards, and if needed then file for bankruptcy.

Don’t agree? OK. Just let a family member suffer or die needlessly from a treatable condition. Go ahead. Be my guest.


Here's the real reason why U.S. health care is so expensive
Anyone who considers this reprehensible is living on Fantasy Island. And the country has elected as president a man who has taken cynical advantage of the bankruptcy laws over and over again, and even boasted about how “smart” that makes him.

How ironic if you needlessly suffer because you think it would be wrong to file for bankruptcy, when the man who put you in this position did so with his businesses on so many occasions that the actual number is in dispute.

Conservatives threw away the moral high ground when they nominated and elected this man.

If Donald Trump can use the bankruptcy laws to keep his solid gold toilet seat, why shouldn’t you use them to save your child’s life?

In these days of easy money, the banks are positively eager to send you credit cards. The credit-scoring system is a joke. It rewards things like punctuality, not your ability to repay. If you borrow a dollar and repay it on time every month, you’ll get rewarded with great credit. You can then apply for more cards.

Naturally if you’re going to accumulate cards as your emergency, catastrophic health-care plan, it makes sense to go for cards with no annual fee.

This was the great hole in the plot of TV’s “Breaking Bad.” Walter White didn’t need to make crystal meth to pay for his cancer treatment. He just needed to build up his credit and pay for it with his cards — after putting the family home in his wife’s name.


New Senate Health Bill Draws Mixed Reactions
The U.S. personal bankruptcy system is a process. The courts are littered with people who’ve run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts doing things like gambling (or hundreds of millions failing to run a casino).

The worst that is likely to happen is that the courts refuse to discharge the debt. And this almost never happens.

Courts generally favor the bankrupt. And why not? No one forces the banks to lend. For every “imprudent borrower” there is an imprudent lender.

The banks charge usurious interest rates on cards to cover this eventuality. Indeed they currently charge about 15% interest —or more — on credit-card debt, when the default rate is less than 3%. Who’s scamming whom?

When it comes to health care, accumulating a huge credit line is one thing you can control.

You don’t control whether you or a family member will develop a terrible, debilitating or life-threatening illness.

You won’t control how much treatments will cost, or the price of the drugs.

You probably won’t control whether your health insurer will cover it.

You won’t control whether you lose your job, and therefore your current health plan, because you got downsized, or your company went bust.

Read: 5 ways to protect yourself from outrageous hospital bills

And you don’t have any control over what they’re doing in Washington either. A group of elected officials are thrashing out a new health-care bill in secret. Chances are you didn’t vote for any of the people involved. And they really don’t care what you think — unless you are a campaign donor or, maybe, a major figure in right-wing media like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or even Ann Coulter.

These politicians are so extreme that the most reasonable voice that the New York Times could find is Ron Johnson — whose favorite book is the far-right anarchofascist bible “Atlas Shrugged.”

These are the people deciding whether your child’s severe ashthma or your spouse who once had a tumor will ever be covered by health insurance in the future?

When these unrepresentative cranks have finally drawn up a bill that satisfies Limbaugh and the donors, they will pass it for signature to the president — a man elected by so few people that his “winning” percentage of the vote, 46%, was about the same as the one Michael Dukakis got in 1988 when he lost in a landslide.

Feel any better?

Read: This increasingly common hidden fee is a nasty surprise on medical bills

A few generations ago, health insurance didn’t matter quite so much. That’s because most serious conditions couldn’t be treated. If you got really sick, chances were you suffered, or died, no matter how much money you had to spend.

Not today. Now all sorts of things are treatable — but sometimes at stupendous cost.

It is a powerful argument for some form of universal coverage, which is why every other developed country has it. (America is literally the only economically advanced country in the world where someone can be accused of far-left socialism for supporting universal health care. From Japan to Australia to England to Germany, our Democrats would be their conservatives.)

Maybe these clowns in Washington will expand health care. Maybe they will even improve the safety net. I wouldn’t bet on that happening with counterfeit money. Would you bet on it with your life?

Edited by GA Tiger at 07:24:16 on 06/27/17