Thread regarding Qualcomm Inc. layoffs

@F8MbaJY-2qug. Silly wabbit. You don't understand insurance policies very well do you? I said "80% coverage with a maximum out of pocket expense of $3000".

To understand health insurance, you should know very well the following terms

1. Insurance Premium

2. Deductible

3. Co-Pay

4. Co-insurance, insurance paid part

5. Co-insurance, your responsibility

6. Maximum out of pocket annually

7. Lifetime insurance payout cap

80% coverage is very bad. If you have and accident or serious illness you are still on the hook for several 100K..

Also if you make under 19K you are NOT Eligible for obamacare, only earners making 19K to about 22K get large subsidies to the premium. Everyone else pays through the nose. So as others mentioned unless you have a serious health condition it is very unlikely you will benefit from ACA.

@F8MbaJY-2rfq, no i pay plenty in taxes. I'm just saying kids today are a waste of an investment. Better hope they get full ride scholarships, otherwise, what is it now? 300K per kid per degree? Nice.

@F8MbaJY-2xzu.. Sadly, prior to the ACA, 1 adult and 1 child, you would have gotten pretty good insurance for about $300/month through Blue Cross that would have had a $1000 deductible and copay of insurance paying 80% for serious things, with a maximum out of pocket expense of $3000.

After ACA, I think the same plan is roughly 3 times that with less coverage.

I love how current employees of QC are bitching about having to pay higher deductbles. You still don't have to pay any premiums. Those that got laid off also have to pay the higher deductibles, and in addition, have to pay the monthly premium. For myself and 1 child that premium is a little over $800 a month plus the higher deductible through Cobra. The Un-Affordable Care Act does me no good this year or next since my income will be over the $40k poverty limit. Just be thankful you have your frickin' job!

@F8MbaJY-2xod. Yeah some.kids are a completr waste of life. Just look at you. Your parents sure wasted a hell of a lot of money. Or maybe they didn't because they were welfare recipients. In that case, us tax payers wasted s hell of a lot of money on you. Can we have our money back?/ zing!

family of 4 paying 3000 per year is ridiculously small. kids are a waste of money anyways. it's not like they can work the family farm to help make ends meet.

@F8MbaJY-1ena. The thing is most Americans are financially incompetent to understand how the ACA would impact them. And the way the ACA was written, it was intentionally written to be misleading and confusing so the majority of the people would be too dumb to understand it. Even one of the original authors of the ACA legislation admitted that the goal was to make it incomprehensible for the majority of Americans that "are too dumb to understand".

Remember this guys? http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/curtis-kalin/obamacare-architect-americans-too-stupid-understand

The sad part is its going to be really hard to fix this the ACA and it cannot be repealed. How do you fix a complex pyramid scheme, which is basically how the ACA works? So basically, over the course of the next few years everyone's healthcare costs are going to continue to go up, benefits are going to continue to go down to pay for all the subsidies free care/inexpensive care to the groups if people that won't be paying for their fair share of what they use.

1qno : awesome story. Pretty sure your neighbor just blamed it on greedy corporations. IMHO, people like that are programmed and no matter what happens, can only see things their way and will rationalize everything around their opinions/feelings about things.

My favorite part about Obamacare and ACA was when my neighbor who was a diehard democrat railing on me when I mentioned how bad the ACA plan was going to be for people, especially those who were part of a small group coverage PPO insurance. I was trying to explain to him that a lot of the previous PPO plans for small groups (like small companies) were relatively inexpensive and provided good coverage for people because they were highly tailored to what a particular person needed. So, for example, if you were a family of 4 with reasonably good health, and just needed routine medicine with occasional specialist or emergency coverage, the premium was relatively inexpensive, and the coverage was great (almost 90%). He was touting however insurance should be even more affordable for everyone else and how richer people should pay more for it, and so he went on telling me how great ACA/obamacare was going to be and how wrong some of us more moderate opposers of the ACA were. I warned him that his premiums would significantly go up because the ACA, the way it was written, every insurance plan was going to have to have a minimum coverage plan, even for benefits and services you didn't need, and you were going to pay for that. It's the only way this plan was going to work, because you needed the majority of healthy people in the population overpaying for services they really don't need and use to make up for all the subsidized healthcare coverage of poor people, and people with pre-existing conditions when you don't expect those people to pay more for insurance despite them using more of it. He didn't believe me, and kept on saying that we were just a pessimist moderate republican trying to derail "progress" in healthcare....

Then December 2015 came around and he got his small group PPO renewal notice. His annual insurance premium for his family for 4 went from $3000/year to $15,000/year, and had considerably more gap for prescription and exams that his daugther needed and previous was completely covered. He went of the rocker about how shitty this was, and how ridiculous it was his insurance went up by 5 times with less coverage. I kept most of my mouth shut. But I did say. "Well, look at it this way. You're helping a lot of people out who can't afford health insurance and a lot of people with pre-existing conditions that weren't uninsurable. That's a good thing, as you were telling me before, right? I mean, everyone who is healthy should be paying more to help those less fortunate out, right?" Dead silence from him. It's funny how generous some of the champions of ACA are with proposing to help "other people out in need" so long as it doesn't come out of their own wallets. But when they are hit with the harsh reality that their insurance went up significantly for significantly less coverage, they bitch and moan about what people were saying was going to happen all along....

@F8MbaJY-1ibr. You do it if you don't have insurance and don't want to pay to get treated. it happens all the time.

Rejoice in liberalism my friends.

1ouk: Who the hell has time to go the doctor or ER for every little thing? Even when I've had an appointment--or an actual medical emergency--I've often had to wait for hours! Kaiser is especially bad in this respect. Some of us have families--or project managers who expect us all to be "on call" practically 24/7. Part of the problem with QCOM is not enough people stay home when they're sick!

F8MbaJY-1gxv. This isn't partisan based. This affects everyone. Even you. If you haven't realized that, you will. Eventually. It sucks... For everyone. Unless you are on welfare. Then it's great for you. And ledts be frank. The biggest welfare recipients tend to be from the southern red states where the majority of the population is at or below the poverty line. Even white people.

You voted for it, now enjoy it. Soon you will share medical care with your middle eastern and African brothers. lol

Actually. That's.o e of the key differences between urgent care and ER care people should now about. I'd you have insurance and you do need to see a doctor urgently, but the visit isn't life threatening, you should try to visit urgent care instead of an ER facility. Er facilities by law have to treat everyone, even the uninsured. So often times uninsured people abuse the ER facility to take care of routine medical exams that they normally should do with a normal doctor if they were insured. As a result, there is always a lot of trisging that goes on in the ER.facility.to determine who really needs.to get treated immediately and ebo can wait. As a result, often times you end up waiting for 4-8hours.

Urgent care is different. They are allowed to refuse treatment to people who are uninsured or who has insurance that the.facility doesn't accept. Good for you that has good insurance,.since you won't have a backlog of freeloaders jamming the system.

Well the good news is that most employers are now making the urgent care and er copay much higher than a normal doctor's visit. I've seen some health plans that have a $10 copay for normal primary care visit. $30 for a specialist. $50 for urgent care and $80-100 for an ER visit. They probably should have done this all along to curtail widespread abuse of the urgent/ER facility. Now if they only eliminated laws that require ER hisiptals to treat everyone, even the uninsured, then the number of people abusing the ER facility without insurance would also drop dramatically.

In regards to xhe's comment: Some of you people seem to have interesting ideas regarding the "abuse" of health care, and "industry norms." How many visits do you get before it's considered "abuse?"

All I know is I had a friend (several decades ago) that would go to the ER for a yeast infection. I kid you not. I tried to explain to her that a yeast infection was NOT an emergency but she felt otherwise (since she couldn't have sex so wanted to get that fixed proto). LOL

It's kind of funny if she wasn't dead serious about that. Then there's the people that fell they must have antibiotics for every little thing. They are over-prescribed due to that and creating super bugs.

If you are on COBRA due to the layoff and subject to the 2016 plan, then it is likely that you can find health insurance similar to Qualcomm's 2015 with slightly lower premiums and slightly higher deductibles (my visits are $20 are rather than $10). You might look into that.

@F8MbaJY-1kj. Sorry buddy. You got this one wrong. The reason why corporations are slowly ditching their old health plans that were better for new shitty plans has a lot to do with the effects of ACA and obamacare. Corporations can't really offer generous health plans moving forward just to select employees. The way the ACA/obamacare is written, and employer must start to offer the same health plan to every employee, otherwise me subjected.to certain penalties. This means that companies need to start offering the same health plans to your high paid.engineers as your hourly non-exempt workers that you employ if they work above a certain number of hours. On top of that, plans which deemed excessive are further considered compensation and taxed as a benefit that the company needs to pay.

Now lets think about the implications for this in terms of costs for a company...in the past, employer sponsored health plans where created by large companies during rooselvelt era to get aroilund salary caps. Companies couldnt pay select talent more for their special abilities, so companies started offering generous health plans to select individuals that were in demand as a form of compenation. Now fasr forward to eaht ombscare/ACA is today. The rules more or lesson require employers to offer the same health plan to every employee, een hourly workers who work above a certain number hours. Now think about qualcomm's executive health plan, ehich was once a perk you get if you made it to senior.staff.and or director level. Lets face it, if you had to offer thst health plan to every employee, your hourly workers, it no longer becomes cost effective. The heath plan itself might be $25k cost.thst you were previously eilling to pay for your top employees, but noe you need to offer the same benefit to all your $25k/year hourly workers. Due to ACA. And on top of that, if that plan is deemed an excessive plan, you need to pay extra taxes to give it to your employee. As a corporate entity ehat eould you do if those rules were crammed drow your throat? Yup, you would eliminate the better health plan you previously only where going to give select individuals and replace it with a shittier plan that was available to everyone, including your hourly workers. (Or you would cut the hours of your hourly workers so that they would.fall below the min number of hours that would qualify them for employer required health plan).

So yes, while the goal of ACA and obamacare was to extend coverage to everyone, including those hourly workers, it had a very interesting side effect of making the employer sponsored health plans much worse for everyone else (all you exempt salaried employees) because obviously and employer isn't going to simply eat the additional cost of insuring non-exempt /hourly employees. They are going to try to pay the same for health care coverage, and that means reducing the benefits of the exempt/salary people just so they can cover all the non exempt people as well. That's exactly why a big company like Qualcomm eliminated the executive health plan and eliminated its previous generous regular health plan it previously offered to salaried employees only. And it's the same reason why every other large company is going to do the same thing, especially as the employer mandates start kicking in with the ACA/obamacare.

All of this were known issues of obamacare.and acs that many of us said was going to happen, despite many of you who insisted ACA/obamacare would be a good thing. Its a great thing

If you have a preexisting condition, aren't insurable yourself, and have a shitty career such that you aren't a salaried employee, or you are self employed, because now other people are going to be indirectly subsidizing your help care costs. But its a shitty deal for those that are salaried, that were previously convered by a good employer sponsored plan that was considered a perk for working for the company. And guess what? This isn't just happening with Qualcomm, every large employer.will start to downsize/right size their health plans, especially as we get closer and closer to when more of the ACA employer mandates start.to kick in over the next year or so.

So... If you were a huge champion of obamacare/ACA and now all pissed that employers are curtailing their once generous health plans. Sorry...you got what you wanted. But to your defense, it isn't completely your fault..most politicians that voted for obamacare didn't read 100+ pages of the obamacare/ACA law that they votednon, which was pretty much written by insurance companies...lol....

OK, this is genius - let's have corporations pay less for healthcare and screw workers even more. Whatever is saved will be channeled back into executive pay and dividend.

So, let's make execs and mega share holders even more rich - while we are doing this we'll f--- the base up to the point of economic extinction. The middle class is already under 50%, down from 70% in 1975 [T. Piketty], of the overall employed corpus.

We've had solid 250 of population and economic growth which started to slow down a decade or so ago - welcome to the new economic reality, we are in uncharted waters and anything can happen over next 10 or 20 years (Trump and Sanders are just a beginning)...

My husband works for a Fortune 100 company, they are semi-openly discouraging them from adding dependents - given that the company is self insured, I am not surprised - the more medical costs they incur, the more they have to pay.

They have introduced a new rule where they require all spouses to state that they do not have an alternative coverage. If they chose to not do so or if they are covered somewhere else, they are slapped with a $150/month surcharge.

@F8MbaJY-1mly..Oh, an whether you want to blame obamacare/ACA on your increased medical costs or not, you cannot deny the fact that if you didn't have your husband's corporate insurance plan and are self-insured with a pre-existing condition, being able to be able to buy ACA insuranceon the exchange with your pre-existing condition (no matter how expensive it is) is still better than being completely uninsurable prior to ACA. I personally dont like ACA or obamacare, but for you're particular case, if you were self-employed, and had to deal with your own insurance, it was meant to help people in that situation, not people who were self-employed who had a spouse that worked in large corporation that provided spouse+family coverage above what the ACA exchange insurance provided.

@F8MbaJY-1mly. Actually, I again, I think you're not correct. Qualcomm isn't the only company discouraging not insuring spouses, every other employer is doing the same thing. Your husband can check with every other major employer and you'll find out that if you insure your spouse or kid, the premium is much more expensive than if you work for a major employer and insure yourself. The only difference is that Qualcomm in the past had much better insurance than before and before Qualcomm only asked if your spouse had health insurance elsewhere that was available and never bothered to check if they really did or didn't. So many people basically lied and said their spouse didn't have insurance elsewhere so that qualcomm would have covered them. If you actually told the truth and said your spouse had insurance coverage elsewhere, the plan specifically said qualcomm's insurance plan (despite being better than average), was to be used as a secondary insurance coverage, but it was more or less an honor system that no one really followed and qualcomm didn't really enforce (unlike manage employers, that actually require your spouse to provide proof of no insurance elsewhere).

Also, up until recently you have been lucky, and you have a spouse that works at qualcomm that offered much better than average health insurance. And now that ACA has kicked it, it directly or indirectly made corporate insurance worse in return for making insurance available over ACA for people with pre-existing conditiona. Now that you have mentioned you are self employed, can you imagine trying to get get insurance yourself being self employed and with a pre-existing condition before ACA if you didn't have a husband that worked at a company like Qualcomm? You probably would be uninsurable or would have a ridiculously high insurance.

Qualcomm's insurance plan for the most part has been much better than average, and a lot has to do with Qualcomm self-insuring it's employees. (United Healthcare only administers the plans). And Qualcomm could afford to do this when times were good AND when ACA didn't punish companies for providing above average coverage to select employees and companies (IE provided tiered insurance to exempt employee, and a executive health plan to senior staff+director level and above, while generally not offering insurance to non-exempt/temp employees)....All that changed with ACA, in which companies could no longer offer these differentiated plans without making it available to everyone. So companies had no choice but to strip their health plans for those that previously enjoyed them and make then "non caddillac plans, as the ACA would classify them as". If you are going to blame anyone, blame ACA and Obamacare.

And like I said, your husband can shop around with a different employer, and he'll probably report back to you that every other major employer has just as crappy of a health plan these days as any other big employer. Ever defense company, every wireless telco company, every startup (even worse)... The only places where he might be able to find a better health plan is if works in the public sector (which I bet he would absolutely hate, as his pay would suck, and his work would be boring as hell) OR if he works at a hospital/healthcare system (like in IT), which his pay would probably also suck as an IT worker and/or be unhappy with the bureaucracy of working in the medical profession, but have better health insurance. In any case, what you are experiencing is basically losing benefits from an company that use to offer a significantly above average insurance plan relative to the industry norm, and now having an insurance plan that is relatively the same as what every other employer offers now. So if you're husband is going to switch jobs only over the health insurance plan, good luck.

1lfv: I'm self-employed. If you haven't guessed already, I am insured through my spouse--which is something else that QCOM seems to want to discourage, despite the fact that employees who are worried about spouses or their kids' health conditions are less productive. He will most likely jump ship as soon as he gets a decent offer--or at least a job in an environment that has less political bullsh*t and management who realize that what they are doing is really NOT as important as brain surgery. To reiterate: It's not the fact that good health care costs more that bothers me. It's the fact that the plan appears to be deliberately designed to discriminate against people whom the ACA was designed to protect--those with certain pre-existing conditions, and family members--which may also be a violation of the Unruh Act.

@F8MbaJY-1nes. First of all. I am really sorry to hear your health situation because those are one of the things that some people just really have no control over, no matter how well they take care of themselves. Yes, it pisses me off that despite me being overly health conscious while the majority of the rest of the population take it for granted. That said, I totally agree that our existing medical system in the u.s. is pretty effed up, and the aca drove up costs for a lot of people (or at least was an excuse that employers and insurers are now using to justify increased health cost). I don't disagree with what you are saying about how much worse off it is for people who pay for insurance. I guess this was part of the plan of aca, for people who can afford to pay for health care to pay more so those that can't(or don't want to) have subsidized medical and dental. Yeah, it sucks. But what can you do? For me I am just thankful as ridiculous as it is and how screwed up aca made it for a lot of us, that st least I in a position to be able to afford the increased costs. Other people aren't so lucky.

I am not sure we really will have a fix for our broken system. As long as you have a for profit insurance company sitting in between patients and medical treatment, I don't think we will ever have reasonable health care, if the goal is to provide it to almost everyone.

For me though, this isn't an issue with the Q specifically. Every employer and insurance company is skimping on medical coverage. And a lot of plans that once were perks have/are being eliminated because in order to keep them, they would ha e to be extended to every employee, exempt or not. Again, an aca artifact. Now add that the Q isn't doing that well, and its no surprise health insurance is going to get gutted.

Again, my suggestion to you is to look for other large employers and compare the entire package. If your total takehome ends up being better, there's really no reason for you to stay loyal to any employer.

@ 1hme: I still stand by my original assertion. I thought I was doing everything right too. Don't live large. Invest in stuff that generally appreciates in value. No fancy cars. I have a "stupid phone" that came FREE with the plan. And, of course, I always had the best health insurance I could afford. One branch of my family was in the insurance business, so I tend to be a firm believer in insurance. Sometimes more than I could afford. Because when other kids' parents were giving them new cars or trips to f---ing Europe as graduation presents, my parents gave me--health insurance. Total coverage. As long as the monthly premium was paid, all was good. And that's pretty much how it went until 2010, when the rules changed. I had my medical "catastrophe" when I was a teenager--so technically I was their medical catastrophe. According to the experts, I should have been dead by age 30. Surprise! But I do have to take medication to have a normal life. That medication has been covered--thanks to the miracle of the Hatch-Waxman Act -- until about 2010, when generics were licensed. There's just one problem: If you have a brittle condition, you can't use generics because of a little something called "bioequivalence." For example: A generic may have the same amount of the exact same active ingredient; but if it is compounded with lactose--the cheap binder of choice, those people who are lactose intolerant will not process it in the same way. If the medication is metabolized in the gut, it can be rendered useless by the non-proprietary binder. I have a brittle condition. And, like many Asian and Mediterranean peoples, I am lactose intolerant. I can't take many generics for this reason. Under the 2015 Plan, my Rx drugs cost me $20 each per month--total was $40. Under the 2016 Plan, they may cost me close to $800 per month. If I get them at CostCo, I can buy them for $700 or less--for the same brand name meds. It's not a question anymore of whether or not I can afford it. I can. That's about three hours worth of work for me. It's about what is right. Generics are a profit center for PBMs. The Plan Sponsor--that would be QCOM--also gets a percentage of the discounts for Rx drugs. Federal and state laws mandate that in certain cases, such as brittle conditions, allergies to ingredients, or exhaustion of other therapeutic equivalents, that the Plan must provide the branded pharmaceuticals at the copay price only. The problem is that there is a procedure for this and the Plan never informs you how to go about it. For years, you only had to have a Prior Authorization filed by a physician. Then in 2014, you had to have your doctor file something called a Brand Penalty Exception for CVS. Now? All bets are off.

I have a few words to say also about people who go cheap on getting auto liability coverage with the minimum payout policy. Especially if you actually have some wealth or net worth that you could lose, even if you were in an accident that wasn't your fault, but nevertheless your insurance company didn't want to deal with ith, and just paid the minimum liability the policy covered and.made you pay the rest of the liability youight be on the hook for yourself above the amount the insurance company paid. For example, if some random guy sues you for a $1million, and your insurance liability is only $25k, the insurance company might pay the guy $25k and tell you that you are on the hook for the remainder amount, even if damage claim is frivolous. After all, you'll be on the hook of finding your own lawyer and paying the cost of litigation, beyond the about that your cheap insurance policy covered. And last.time I checked, a decent lawyer is around $300-400/hour.

@F8MbaJY-1hme. I completely disagree that we are all one medical catastrophe away from bk.

You see, unlike you, I went through a medical catastrophe, and I was chemotherapy for about 4 years now (and finally got off). I would have been in a medical catastrophe if I cheapened out on getting insurance or decided to get no insurance because the cost was expensive. But rather than splurging on an expensive car payment or getting the latest and greatest iPhone, I spent my money on getting expensive health insurance and keeping a emergency cash reserve even when there was nothing 4years ago that even remotely suggested I would end up with what I had. My total out of pocket expense for each year was roughly $10k/year including all the doc costs/surgery/infusion/specialists/co pays/etc, including a high deductible and cop pay limit. And although $10k isn't exactly chump change for me, it certainly beats the $150k retail bill I would have been on the hook for each year, without any insurance company negotiating it down to 1/10th of the original cost. I really challenge you if you are ever in a similar predicament to have the time, energy, strength to do a better.job negotiating how much your treatment will cost than an insurance company can. And with that, I don't need to file for bk. My house is still free in clear, my kids still can go to college with me paying a full tuition, and my spouse doesn't go through a financial burden. And I still have all my retirement savings (both pre and post tax) in tact.

It is true you cannot predict when your health might go south any day. But you can minimize getting totally wiped out from it and wiping out your entire family's net worth simply by not skimping on health insurance, the same way that you should never skimp on liability insurance if you have wealth/money that you would be afraid of losing.

It amazes me how many people in this country prioritizes wants such as a new car new cell phones vacations etc above needs, and it amazes me even more how unwilling people are to accept the fact that insurance is a need that needs to prioritized above other wants...sell, at least until its too late for those people with no insurance or.those people who under insure.

1olw: You're right about having to buy it when you don't need it. If we hadn't bought it years ago, when we were just starting out, we might never have gotten it. As it is, they discontinued that type of policy for all but those who kept up the payments. Guess it was too comprehensive. : )

1mai: No, BK is not for everyone. It's for anyone whose back is up against the wall, financially speaking. And like it or not, we are all one medical catastrophe away from BK. Medical emergencies involving the principal breadwinner are one of the highest contributing causes for BK. There's an old saying: You can't get blood from a turnip. IF a creditor can't collect, his best option is to sell the debt. The person who buys the debt is a debt collector. Debtors have more leverage with debt collectors due to the protections of the FDCPA.

@F8MbaJY-1quj. catastrophic insurance is a lot like life insurance. It's cheap to buy when you don't think you need it. And hence most people don't end up buying it, until they really need it. And then when they need it, those people end up either being uninsurable or the premiums are ridiculously high. Plus, make sure you read all the fine print about catastropic insurance, particularly wrto pre-existing continues. I'm not trying to bust your chops or anything. I'm just speaking from a prespective of "been there, done that, thought about it". Truthfully, no one likes increasig insurance costs while simulatenously having reduced coverage and more exclusions. But there's not much you can do about it, and you might think you can outsmart the insurance system, but you really can't. You won't win. You just have to chalk this up as extra cost you either need to pay out of pocket or pay a heavier premium for. And you aren't alone.

@F8MbaJY-1aje. Well, it's time to reconsider your entire comp package to whatever any other employer is offering. For example, I'd shop your resume at a big company like Intuit or BAE or whatever else floats your boat. If you find something that has a better comp package, then well, why would you stay? And if you can't find something that is better, well it sucks, but it's about taking the best thing available given the current market conditions. Simple case of supply and demand of labor. From what folks are telling me, the market isn't so bad for well skilled people. So you might be surprised and find something better. And if you don't and don't want to relocate, well I guess you just have to suck it up until the market conditions favor employees versus employers.

quo: They sell separate catastrophic healthcare and disability policies for that reason. Most employer sponsored health insurance plans max out at around $3 million. Maybe less this year. (Who knows! I can't find a copy of the entire policy for 2016.) Let's say I get the Big "C": Initial specialists' evaluation and testing--about $50,000. One day's stay in a cancer ICU--about $20,000 in SoCal hospitals. One day's doses of cutting edge chemotherapeutic cancer meds in parenteral solution administered by IV: $30,000.... Throw in at least $100,000 total for the radiation and specialists--and how many extra days does that $3 million buy me? I have a feeling that United will find a loophole that lets them avoid paying long before the $1 million mark is reached. Insurance companies excel at risk avoidance.

@F8MbaJY-1mai. Um, and no. If you are BK, especially in a tight rental market like in SoCal or NorCal, good luck being able to find affordable housing unless you are going to be paying a premium above what people with good credit normally would have to pay. Heck, I have folks in the business that won't even talk to be with less than a 700 FICO score. Also, in some jobs, having lousy credit will preclude you from qualifying from a job. Particularly those jobs dealing requiring security clearance or dealing with financial transactions/PII.

@F8MbaJY-nmm. Like I said, let me know once you are bankrupt or filing for bankruptcy how that works out for you. Again, I hardly consider once you are in this financial state, you are in a position of strength when it comes to negotiations. I wouldn't know, because I don't think I would ever risk putting myself in a situation in which I would have to declare bankruptcy. Would you? if so, be my guest. Let me know how that works out for you.

When I was hired into Qualcomm, they bragged about how good their health insurance is. I took that into account when deciding upon the Q. Now what?

@ xhe: They don't have debtors' prisons anymore. If you don't pay the hospital, they may attempt to put a lien your house or other property, but there's only so much they can legally attach and in some states, they can't attach property held TBE, and FL prohibits attachments on your domicile. It really makes more sense for them to work with people--because bankruptcy is a way out. And negotiation is actually cheaper for them than hiring an attorney to deal with the adversary action in bankruptcy. As you point out, it a BK rides on your credit for 7 years; but you can't file another BK for at least 2 years after a Ch. 7, so it's amazing the offers of credit you can get--because you HAVE to pay 100% for at least the next 2 years or the creditor has a slam-dunk case against you for the money. Pretty much the same for savvy landlords. People who are trying to crawl out from under a BK tend to be very cooperative tenants. They want the good reference when they move on. A Ch. 13 or Ch. 11 allows the debtor and creditors to negotiate--but doing it without the attorneys and the trustees' cuts is a lot faster and cheaper for everyone. By the way, most of the hospitals in S.D. will work out a payment plan if you can't pay it in a lump sum. So will many of the doctors. Some doctors will also order high end pharmaceuticals--Like Simponi (--normally about $2,000 per pen--) at the physician price--which is usually about 25%--30% of what you would be charged by the specialty pharmacy at someplace like CVS--however, this may not be covered by insurance.

Kaiser is not so great from my experience.

I take care of routine medical and dental care in Tijuana (I am not Hispanic btw). I know other that have had surgery in Thailand and other Asian countries. This is the future of healthcare, not being a slave to a crappy corporation so you do not go bankrupt if you spend a few nights in the hospital.

@F8MbaJY-xhe. Oh, and yeah, I agree with your assessment of what you said about the ACA. Lol. That's what many of us have been thinking would happen all along. I was hopefully we would be wrong. It certainly doesn't look that way.