Do you have medical insurance?

[wmw999 2,589]

The upshot, though, is that if someone has a bigtime injury, it will be treated. The longer-term care and rehab options are not as good if you don't have insurance, but no one is willing to leave an uninsured skydiver lying on the ground if they biff.

If someone can't afford to pay for insurance up front, it might be that they can't afford payments if something happens. And yeah, if you have a pre-existing condition, the rules change and it gets incredibly harder to find decent insurance at anything remotely resembling an affordable price. Choosing to seriously limit your risk by reducing the level of skydiving is one approach (e.g. very conservative wingloading, very conservative choice of jumping partners, very conservative flying, etc).

Note: I have skydived without insurance in the past; throwing stones too hard causes my glass house to break. My university, lo these many years ago, didn't offer insurance. I was lucky.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[d_squared431 0]

There is interest added to the bill. It is called a late charge and they tack that on at the end of every month regardless if you have a payment plan with them or not. It can be 5 dollars or 20% of the actual bill. Depends on the state/hospital/doctors policy.

TPM Sister#130ONTIG#1
I love vodka.I love vodka cause it rhymes with Tuaca~LisaH
You having a clean thought is like billyvance having a clean post.iluvtofly

[Airman1270 0]

Nothing wrong with having insurance but let's not be ugly toward people who don't.

I broke my ankle on my first jump in 1982. It took a few years but I paid the bills myself.

I don't have insurance. Six years ago I got sick. The doctor & the drugs cost about $150. It would have cost much more than that to have maintained a policy under which I would have been "covered." I saved thousands of dollars by NOT being insured, and I still got the health care when I needed it.

Of course I wouldn't mind having a catastrophic policy with a high deductible. If I could be sure they wouldn't discrimminate against skydiving injuries I'd be a bit more eager to make the effort to obtain one.

In the meantime, I jump a 220 and let the guys with the awesome insurance coverage do the swooping.

Cheers,
Jon S.

[virgigirlie 0]

I'm currently making monthly payments with no interest (from when I had insurance that didn't pay for a significant amount of a surgery and separately from when I did not have insurance). I DO NOT get charged any interest or late fees.

Everything will vary by where you are/who you're working with, but I would only get charged a penalty if I actually paid late.

I just mean that there is a route for people who can't pay upfront, regardless of whether or not they have insurance.

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." ~Catherine Aird

[d_squared431 0]

There are also resources set up by the hospitals for patients. If you do the research and dont mind the paperwork that is involved. Patients can qualify for almost 50 percent off of surgical procedures and their bills.

TPM Sister#130ONTIG#1
I love vodka.I love vodka cause it rhymes with Tuaca~LisaH
You having a clean thought is like billyvance having a clean post.iluvtofly

[dks13827 3]

IMO, it would be irresponsible for me or my family to jump without some kind of catastrophic care medical insurance... I wouldnt do without it for my car, of course... too much risk of a catastrophic loss.

[kbordson 8]

Here's a question.

Most states mandate auto insurance. In order to legally drive, you need to ensure that you are covered if you get into an accident (at least limited coverage). If you drive without insurance (using whatever "reason" you want to list: premiums are too high because those speeding tickets weren't my fault, paperwork hassles, just don't bother) and get into an accident - if you are unable to meet that responsibility (even with a payment plan option), you go to jail.

Do you REALLY want the government getting involved and mandating insurance like that?

Or is it better for society for an individual to be willing to accept responsibility for ones actions.
I'm not saying "YOU NEED INSURANCE." If you want to pay cash for services or have a catastrophic coverage plan, nothing wrong with that. It's the selfish and irresponsible attitude that "they HAVE TO take care of me" and "someone else will play for it." that is truly offensive to those of us that value self-responsibility. Not to say that the ER shouldn't take care of you, but you should be willing to compensate a provider for services rendered.

[wmw999 2,589]

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Or is it better for society for an individual to be willing to accept responsibility for ones actions.

It is definitely better for society for all individuals to be willing to accept responsibility for their actions.

The laws mandating auto insurance exist because the proportion of drivers who don't accept that responsibility is big enough to make it worth encoding.

How do we get people to be more responsible? Just trusting them isn't very effective.

Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[GeorgiaDon 380]

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Rig manufacturers don't offer the same payment plans because you don't need the rig and because they'd get taken advantage of.

You also don't need to skydive or engage in other activities that have a significant risk of resulting in costly injuries, if you can't ensure that you can pay for it in a timely manner (timely being within the bounds of what the hospital will be willing to negotiate of course).

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Nobody's out there femuring just so they can screw over the hospital.

Of course not, nobody said they were.

Look, I'm fine with the idea of "I don't expect anyone to pay for it other than myself", if a person can really do that. For a broken tib/fib or wrist, certainly that's doable. If we're talking about a major injury (multiple broken bones, maybe brain injury) resulting in multiple surgeries, months in the hospital, and a year of PT, then we're talking about bills in the hundreds of thousands or even $1,000,000+ (look up Dead Mike some time). Lets say we're talking about $100,000 in bills; paying that off at $20/month for the "rest of my life" would take 417 YEARS at NO interest. I guess that's why I took that comment to be flip and possibly even intentionally disparaging to medical professionals. If I misinterpreted I'm sorry, but to me that's much like getting excellent service and a first-class meal in a restaurant, and then tipping 2 cents and getting in a Lexus to drive home. Somehow that's more insulting than "forgetting" to tip altogether. $20 a month isn't even one skydive; if you can afford to jump you can afford more than that. Realistically you should be thinking along the lines of $800/month for a long time (10 yrs or more). If you can afford to "self-insure" it's a safe bet that you can afford a high-deductible insurance policy that will knock your share of that $100,000 down to maybe $10,000 and not screw over the doctors as a bonus.

No-one likes to think about it, but what happens in the case where a jumper is seriously injured, racks up big bills, then eventually dies. If they don't have medical insurance it's a pretty sure bet they don't have life insurance either, in which case all those doctors and nurses who worked to try to save the jumper are left with nothing.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[FlyingJ 0]

I'm far from being an expert, and even a pretty good jaunt from being knowledgeable about the topic, but it seems it really doesn't matter whether one "fully accepts the consequences of one's actions." They might be willing to pay $20 a month for the rest of their life, but the health care industry can't sustain itself with everyone paying $20 a month. Those that can pay (whether it be cash or via insurance) are going to pay the sky high prices that the medical community has to charge to be able to accept the $20 a month from the other people. Might it be possible that if more people paid all, all people would pay less?

I work for a 911 ambulance service that does an obscenely large number of "medicare taxi" calls. We could make a serious push in the community to slow down the calling of 911 for non-emergency transports, but the problem is we have so many people in the county without insurance who can't pay an ambulance bill that the medicare calls are a HUGE percentage of our income and no matter how much we hate them, we couldn't survive without them. It's a vicious circle!

Killing threads since 2004.

[FlyingJ 0]

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No-one likes to think about it, but what happens in the case where a jumper is seriously injured, racks up big bills, then eventually dies. If they don't have medical insurance it's a pretty sure bet they don't have life insurance either, in which case all those doctors and nurses who worked to try to save the jumper are left with nothing.

I wouldn't say that the doctors, etc. are left with nothing as they are still taking home their paycheck. The problem is that the cost of doing business in general is that much higher because the medical community must factor in the amount of service they will have to write off. With less instance of catastrophic injury resulting in unpaid bills we would likely see less cost across the board.

My dad put it as bluntly to me as possible a number of years ago. I was paying for an individual insurance policy that I took out before I was willing to start AFF. I jumped for about a year before I couldn't afford it any more and when I was no longer jumping I considered canceling the policy. He told me that if I couldn't afford it he would pay for it, because him paying $100 or so a month for an insurance policy for me was far cheaper than him losing his house to pay my medical bills after a catastrophic car wreck. You might think the choice is up to you, but what will your loved ones do when you are in a coma and the bills start coming to them?

Killing threads since 2004.

[kbordson 8]

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I wouldn't say that the doctors, etc. are left with nothing as they are still taking home their paycheck. The problem is that the cost of doing business in general is that much higher because the medical community must factor in the amount of service they will have to write off. With less instance of catastrophic injury resulting in unpaid bills we would likely see less cost across the board.

Actually, I have known several doctors that had to go several months without a paycheck to just keep the doors of their clinic open. And I've known doctors that had to sell their practice to keep the doors open.

[PLFXpert 0]

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Might it be possible that if more people paid all, all people would pay less?

Yes.

Some people cannot pay all. Others (who can afford to skydive regularly) should be able to (be it through insurance or...). It is the latter that is the problem because more often they do not pay all, because they can not pay all, because they have some sense of entitlement to have been skydiving regularly and such despite their circumstances.

Paint me in a corner, but my color comes back.

[FlyingJ 0]

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I wouldn't say that the doctors, etc. are left with nothing as they are still taking home their paycheck. The problem is that the cost of doing business in general is that much higher because the medical community must factor in the amount of service they will have to write off. With less instance of catastrophic injury resulting in unpaid bills we would likely see less cost across the board.

Actually, I have known several doctors that had to go several months without a paycheck to just keep the doors of their clinic open. And I've known doctors that had to sell their practice to keep the doors open.

Yikes. I guess I was really only thinking of docs operating via big mainstream hospitals w/ a pretty much guaranteed patient load. Not thinking about the small independent practice type.

Killing threads since 2004.

[tetra316 0]

I firmly believe if you can afford to skydive, you can afford, at least, major medical. It's irresponsible otherwise to not have insurance, especially if you are engaging extra risky activities within skydiving. I have no sympathy for those who end up with astronomical medical bills after they have chosen NOT to have any kind of insurance.

Please do not misunderstand though, this only relates to their rising bills as a result of an direct choice, NOT the fact of the incident itself.

[SkyDekker 1,465]

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I firmly believe if you can afford to skydive, you can afford, at least, major medical. It's irresponsible otherwise to not have insurance, especially if you are engaging extra risky activities within skydiving. I have no sympathy for those who end up with astronomical medical bills after they have chosen NOT to have any kind of insurance.

Please do not misunderstand though, this only relates to their rising bills as a result of an direct choice, NOT the fact of the incident itself.

+1

The OP also asked if people donate. In these cases I am not willing to donate...

Flame away.

[tetra316 0]

I'm willing to help out in any other way I could EXCEPT I would not contribute to medical bills. If you had insurance and were still left with huge bills, well that's another story and I'd be willing to help in that case.