However, as expensive as medical insurance is, it’s less costly that going without it. For the average uninsured person, it doesn’t take many trips to the emergency room to drive you to bankruptcy. A typical visit to the ER costs upwards of $1,000 dollars. And God forbid you need to be hospitalized. One week in the average hospital is going to cost you fifty grand. That’s a hell of a lot of rent and more than enough to wipe most of us out. It’s certainly enough to make you think twice before saying that you can’t afford major medical insurance. The truth is you can’t afford not to have it.

Of course, government programs going into effect over the next few years aim to reduce the cost of medical insurance for those with lower incomes, but don’t kid yourself: it’s still going to be expensive. Perhaps all the more so because the insurance companies will need to insure those who are in poor health, spreading the cost of coverage amongst all of us.

Perhaps the best argument for biting the bullet and getting medical insurance whether you can afford it or not, though, is that studies have shown that it increases your life expectancy. Perhaps this is blatantly obvious already, but that’s especially true if you have a life threatening condition.

One poignant example is Cystic Fibrosis patients. Those with medical insurance, who are able to receive the appropriate care when they need it, live an average of more than 20 years after they are diagnosed. Those without medical insurance live an average of about 6 years after diagnosis.

Of course, that’s only one medical condition. There are literally thousands of different things that can kill you which can be prevented, or at least significantly delayed, with proper medical care. So, even before it becomes mandatory for every US citizen to have medical insurance, you might want to consider looking at other areas you can cut back rather than your health budget.

Photo via Sam Howzit

Medical insurance has been around since the 1800s, but it didn’t really catch on en masse until the Second World War. During that time, there was a fairly significant labor shortage in the United States. This was coupled with a number of government regulations that capped or froze wages, so that employers couldn’t offer more money as an incentive to work for them. To make up for this, employers started offering generous fringe benefit packages. Of course, these eventually became part of the national fabric, something we all expect from our employers.

Initially, medical insurance only covered hospital visits and emergencies, and patients were still expected to pay for routine doctor’s visits. As the years passed and labor organizations bargained for better benefits, insurance has come to cover more and more. Here are a few things most insurance companies will cover that our grandparents in the ‘50s sure as hell didn’t expect:

• Weight loss surgery. Of course, back then, being overweight didn’t carry quite as much of a stigma, and since people tended to be less sedentary, they didn’t tend to get as heavy too often anyway. But if someone was heavy, they had a fairly simple solution. Eat less. Even if weight loss surgery had been around, they wouldn’t have expected their small premiums to entitle them to an optional surgery costing thousands of dollars.

• Birth control. They were too busy making the Baby Boom generation to think about it, and for many of them it was against their religion. Of course, birth control wasn’t widely available at the time anyway, and in most places, it was against the law to provide it to unmarried people.

• Viagra. Or Cialis. Or any of the others that have come along behind them. Originally designed to treat hypertension and angina, this family of drugs was quickly found to have certain other benefits. I doubt Grandpa would have thought that someday his medical insurance might pay for this. Judging by how many kids their generation produced, I doubt he’d have cared. I wonder what he’ll think if they start covering Extenz?

Photo via srqpix

Now, without getting into the politics of it all (which we try to avoid whenever possible here), it’s worth thinking about the pros and cons of employers providing medical insurance for their employees.

Here are a couple of the pros:

• Group discounts. By providing medical insurance to their employees, companies are able to get a significant discount on the premium rates for insurance. This is because the insurance provider is able to spread their risk around to a larger number of people.
• Job competition. Even in a down economy, there are some sectors that have a high demand for personnel and that have to compete for the best of the best. Offering medical insurance as a benefit lets companies compete with one another in the area of recruitment.

There are some downsides to this arrangement, as well:

• Less insurance marketplace competition. When employers offer insurance, their employees are likely to accept it largely because it’s much cheaper than buying their own. And, while some employers offer different plans to choose from, the employee isn’t choosing from the entire available market, but rather a limited number of possibilities.
• Self-employed people pay much more. Because the self-employed and small businesses don’t have the large employee base, they can’t get as good a discount on insurance. This means that employees of small businesses, as well as self-employed folks, pay significantly more than everyone else.

There are some ways around these problems. One possible solution is the idea of the health insurance exchanges, which has been used in Massachusetts and is in the new health care legislation. Another would be employers offering a cash payment for medical insurance, and then allowing employees to pick from the entire marketplace.

Regardless of what happens with reform, it’s likely that the idea of employer-provided medical insurance will go the way of the dodo in the next few decades.

Photo via SOCIALisBETTER

Currently, medical insurance is only offered to full-time Apple employees. This includes employees of Apple’s retail stores. Currently, however, many of the employees at Apple’s retail stores are part-time employees. Some of those work as few as 15 hours a week. The new plan would offer medical insurance even to those employees.

To be eligible to sign up for this benefit, an employee has to have been with Apple for at least a year. It is estimated that Apple has more than 16,000 retail employees, of which nearly 10,000 are part time employees. Some estimates suggest that this move will cost Apple around $80 million per year or more.

This change is in response, at least in part, to dissatisfaction among part time Apple employees. Apple surveyed the employees, to see what they could do to increase satisfaction. Improved benefits was a repeated response, and medical insurance hit the top of the list as to which benefits employees would like to see.

Currently, Apple pays around 65 percent of the health coverage costs of their employees, and it is expected that this percentage will remain the same for its part time employees. On average, companies in the United States pay around 73 percent of the costs of medical insurance for those companies that do offer medical insurance benefits.

The good news for Apple seems to be that the $80 million price tag is a drop in the bucket, especially when you put that figure into the context of the Apple stores, where most of the part-timers are. The Apple stores will have had around $6.5 billion in sales in 2009, with about $1.4 billion in profits. Taken in context, the cost of the insurance to Apple is less than six percent of their profits.