Do you know someone who has suffered a heart attack, a stroke or has had cancer? If there was a program which would have written them a check for $10,000, $20,000, $25,000 or more, do you think it would have had a better impact on them - at least financially? What if in six months you or your spouse suffered a critical illness - how would that impact your family?
Ninety-five percent of men and seventy percent of women will suffer from cancer, stroke or heart attack during their lifetime. A married couple has an 83% chance of one of them getting cancer. The first 3-6 months are critical. Your expenses can range anywhere from $13,460 to as much as $50,000. What about the things that aren’t medically related. You still have a house to take care of, a family to feed, maybe a wedding to pay for or college tuitions. What if this happened to you or your spouse? How prepared are you?
Bill Clinton said it best back during his presidency “Millions of Americans are just a pink slip away from losing their health insurance, and one serious illness away from losing all of their savings. Millions more are locked into the jobs they have now just because they or someone in their family has once been sick and they have what is called the preexisting condition. “
A fairly recent Harvard study states that 54.5% of all bankruptcy filings are due to medical bankruptcy. Most of them were middle class and nearly three-quarters of them had insurance. Often illness led to job loss, and with it the lost of health insurance. Out-of-pocket medical cost (such as co-payments, deductibles and uncovered medical services) averaged $13,460 for those with insurance at the onset of their illness, vs. $10,893 for the uninsured. In many cases, high medical bills combined with a loss of income as illness forced breadwinners to lose time from work.
Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection at the time of the onset of the illness. Families with coverage had unaffordable co-payments, deductibles and bills for uncovered items like physical therapy. Even the best job-based health insurance often vanished when illness caused job loss precisely when families needed it most. “Too often, health insurance is an umbrella that melts in the rain.”
The study mentioned uncovered items like physical therapy. In just about every major medical, employer or private insurance has a separate limitation on physical therapy. How much do you think physical therapy cost now a days? Some of these limitations are lower than the average deductible or even worse insurance companies only pay up to a small number of visits or only $25-$30 for each visit. Now, you pay the difference.
The biggest question here is how prepared are you? How protected is your income as well as your assets? What if you did lose your job due to a critical illness? There are programs that will write you a check for an amount you choose, based on what you can afford, not tied to your income. The investment is small compared to the benefit of receiving that check when your family needs it the most.
Butch Zemar - President
Elite Benefits of America
