This is the best news of the day for me.
Most of the time, when the forum helps to save someone a significant amount of money, it goes quietly unnoticed. So it's good to hear stories from people who are enthusiastically grateful about making positive life changes in response to what they read here.
@Sol - have you been happy w/the the Aetna HDHP in general?
Yes I'm happy, but we basically haven't used it and we are well paid enough to cover our actual medical costs out of pocket, which is not true for everyone. The coverage network is good where I live (though we did have to change pediatric dentists), but we're basically only using our plan for catastrophic coverage and we haven't had any catastrophes, so we continue to pay out of pocket for normal little expenses.
I like that preventative care is 100% covered, including dental. We don't have copays anymore for routine visits, like we did with BCBS. And the $75 per person per year cash bonus is good incentive to get our annual bloodwork done, which we otherwise would probably skip.
On the other hand, paying out of pocket means we sometimes delay getting nagging problems checked out. If something is bugging you and you want a doc to look at it, you're going to pay a few hundred dollars for the visit, while under BCBS you went for just the price of the copay because you had already paid the extra hundreds as premiums. It's easier to emotionally justify getting care when it's already sunk costs, and harder when you actually pay for every visit.
I would switch back to BCBS if I thought we had major upcoming medical expenses, like surgeries or perpetual expensive meds. But for ordinary stuff for my family of five, the HDHP has worked out to be cheaper for us. We pay a net total of about $2500 per year to insure and treat the whole family, while maintaining protection against catastrophic events for the equivalent of only a few hundred dollars per year beyond our actual costs.
Whatever sort of health reform gets passed, whether it is repeal or repair, seems likely to include raising the HSA limits. This is one of those cases where conservatives are going to make me even more rich (with a bigger tax break) because I am already rich enough to cover my medical expenses out of pocket. If they double the HSA limit, as both the House and Senate plans have proposed, I will save another $1,890/year on my taxes (28% of another $6,750 in HSA contributions). Thank you, Mitch McConnell.
