Health Care Benefits

from Ben's mom

I have spent more than 50 hours over the last 6 weeks researching health care benefits, health savings accounts (HSAs), and health insurance (both individual and group). It has been a learning experience.

I worked in health care (reception, medical records) for nearly 7 years during my college years and some after. (It is a field that will never go away and not that hard to find a job in.) So I had a lot of the language down. I could throw around terms with the rest of them and feel pretty smug.

Now.... Well, I have learned: We have a serious bureaucracy here. Government has written law after law (correctly called "code" because it takes an attorney to decipher it or even find the law in the first place). And when the law doesn't work, rather than repeal it, a new more comprehensive law is written that invalidates the old law (almost, but no so completely that you can disregard it). So having waded through layers and layers of information on some of the poorest websites and most convuluted government offices, I have discovered that I now know enough to know I know nothing. (Well, it is not quite that bad.)

Here is a real life example of how our government works (or doesn't). I had an employer benefits question (Was it legal to do something?) So I called the Department of Labor in my state. They directed me to the Washington State Insurance Commissioner's Office because the question had to do with health insurance benefits. And when I got someone there on the phone, he directed me back to the Dept. of Labor because it wasn't really an insurance question, but an employer benefits question. When I explained that it was DOL that had directed me to this office, the nice helpful man suggested that I should call the federal Dept. of Labor. By the time that my calls had been returned, I had actually found my answer elsewhere. In the meantime, I heard of a lot of "That isn't my department."

That all said, I have learned a lot and have started offering unsolicited advice to friends and families on health insurance. And I confirmed that I made the right choice by writing off a career in law in about the 8th grade. Having read a lot of "code" I have bookmarked pages I hope to only use in case of serious insomnia in the future.