…which, honestly, were crap. I worked for a Fortune Top 40 company, which was making money hand over fist, but even with their top health insurance plan with the lowest deductible and the highest employee contribution, a heart attack (when I was 62) and major abdominal surgery (when I was 64) damn near bankrupted us.
I have a surgical consult tomorrow for a problem I've had for 12 years, which I put off, and put off, and put off until it's now interfering with every single thing I do except for lying down.
- If I had fixed the problem when I was working for Top 40 company, the addition of that medical cost would have bankrupted me.
- I earned an occurrence (an unexcused absence) the day I had the heart attack because I didn't work through to the end of my shift. I was written up for leaving before the end of my shift. My then-supervisor didn't want the company to spend the money for an ambulance, so I drove myself to the hospital, walked in, said “I think I'm having a heart attack” and went right into intensive care. (That was the same supervisor who, on our first one-on-one, opened the conversation by asking, “So, you're getting close to retirement, aren't you?”)
- The company I worked for offered short term disability leave — at 60 percent of your working salary. (Managers got 100 percent of their working salary, for up to one year. We grunts got six weeks. I understand from friends who are still working there that has been downgraded to two weeks.)
I've had two jobs in 53 years which had decent health benefits — one when I was working for the city, back in the 1980s and early 1990s; and the other at a publishing company which was easily the best (and my favorite) job I've ever had. The rest of the places had health benefits ranging from mediocre to bad (top 40 company) to essentially non-existent.
Moral of the story: there is something seriously and deadly wrong with a system — and a country — which encourages people to put off having necessary medical care, and living in various levels of pain, rather than having a system in place where we get our bodies fixed at the time something goes wrong.
NB – I truly hate the company I used to work for. When we replaced our washer last December, I bought it from their competitor and sent the CEO a letter telling him what we'd done — and why.