Maybe but for someone from a rich family to forego medical insurance in the Obamacare era would be very VERY stupid.
I feel like it only makes sense for rich families to forgo health insurance. Reading that their net worth is like, $100M.
Imagine you see that amount on a health insurer’s statutory balance sheet. Would you have any reservations about such a company’s ability to pay out medical claims on an extended family of, lets say, 100?
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Very true.
I’m not. Most doctors don’t want to deal with pain and assume you’re trying to scam them for narcotics.
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Eh, medical treatments can easily go into the 7 figure range and even 8 figures is not unheard of, so yes, it is stupid for someone worth even $1,000,000,000 to go without insurance.
7 or 8 figures is a large number, but is it larger than 7 or 8 figures divided by 0.85 + opportunity cost?
Same in Canada but some of the farmers where my farm is make a killing growing non-GMO crops. It is a premium product like organic.
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Sure, but I’d rather have the insurance. Maybe if my net worth was materially over a billion.
Remember “Member X” in Iowa who was racking up over $1,000,000 a month in healthcare charges? That was like a decade ago IIRC so probably more today.
You’d need close to a billion of investments (not total net worth) for the earnings on your money to cover the medical expenses. And that’s just for one person. What if you gave birth to triplets who all needed that kind of care?
If my net worth was ONLY $100 million I’d want insurance for my whole family. The premium is peanuts compared to protecting my potential losses.
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Personally, I’ll probably keep health insurance forever, regardless of how rich I get. I’m too lazy and uninformed to locate specialists and negotiate prices myself.
I imagine that the super rich have access to some kind of boutique concierge health service that supersedes the need for to go through some NAIC approved middleman, though.
They have a concierge Dr.
You pay a retainer per year, and they are basically at your beck and call whenever you need them.
This would work fine for most medical issues, but for specialised issues I don’t think it would help them much.
They would still need to pay a lot of $$$ to jump the queue
in order to get specialised care.
I guess that if you are a billionaire you might be able to afford an entire medical team on retainer, but that would be rare.
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Yeah, if you’re a billionaire the $8,000 or whatever that you’d pay each year for an exchange plan is nothing.
You could get a high deductible plan because you can easily afford to pay the first $X for care.
What you’d really want is a plan that does NOT cover preventative care, but that probably no longer exists in the United States.
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Someone who needs 1m month in healthcare that has 3 kids each needing the same is a bit out in the tail, isn’t it?
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I was envisioning having multiple children with the same medical condition. It was hemophilia which is genetic. Maybe you wouldn’t have 3 kids needing a million a month in care, but in a large family you could certainly have multiple children with expensive special needs.
The risk/reward seems not worth it, even for a rich person.
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If you are growing for the European market, where GMO is generally shunned for human consumption, you’d use non-GMO. Canola existed before GMO (as is generally used though scientifically poorly defined) was a thing.
yes, it is.
I was trying to get this member x into perspective and I did a simple Google search for managing cancer and it got to like 40k per month giving all treatments now. This highlighted the extremity of member x so I decided to just Google the case.
For Health actuaries what’s your experience with high cost claimants? Do you have other examples?
Yep, I’ve had chronic nerve pain since my mid-30s, and I’m 50 now. I can understand how that leads some to despair.
In my case, I can only take the edge off my pain. Not everything is fixable.
I assume because they were a hemophiliac.
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Hmmm I always knew hemophilia drugs were expensive but I thought I was only extremely expensive when they had a cut or a fall (namely surgery)
The boy from iowa was famous.
Ive had clients w 2 different $9m claimants in the last few years.
Had a client w nicu case billing $100k a day w no projected discharge date.
Largest claim i worked on was $30m billed in 5 months, negotiated down to about 12m. You dont want necrotizing fasciitis.
Largest claim rumored system-wide (us system) was about $35m paid in a single year.
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Boy in iowa was an outlier bc his doc treated him prophylactically w the clotting factor.
Adoloescents are the worst bc young boys are historically shit at following proptocols in general. That extends to other disordered where compliance is needed. But puberty brungs growth and internal bleeds too
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