Think insurance as an entrepreneur is a bad bet Think again (aka My response to Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and his ridiculous advice)

Think insurance as an entrepreneur is a bad bet Think again (aka My response to Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and his ridiculous advice) Please dont hit me, I dont have health insurance tote from PapaLlama In my 4 years as a blogger, Ive never done what Im doing right now. I never read a post (by someone Im a subscriber toor otherwise, come to think of it) and got so enraged that I dropped everything to post a response right now.    There is nothing more important to me in this moment in time than to respond to How to Make Health Insurance a Bad Bet on Zen Habits. You can find the post here. Please read it through (skimming is fine the jist is very easy to get), and come back over. Just in case you didnt see it, heres my absolute favorite/most enraging part: What you’re really throwing away: For my family, a high-deductible insurance policy can cost $4,000-5,000 a year (about $350-400 a month). For a smaller family, it would be less. A lower-deductible insurance policy costs a lot more. Assuming a monthly payment of $380 and an annual return rate of 8%, if you invest that instead of spend it on insurance, you’d have  $250,000 in 20 years. More, if you adjust the payments upward for inflation. That’s a big amount to gamble on something where you have less than 1% chance of using.() As you get into your 50s, your odds go up, and into your 60s, they go up a lot. Most people who have heart attacks or cancer are in their 60s or older. Same thing for frailty, Alzheimers, hip fractures, etc. As you get older, it gets very likely you’ll need expensive health insurance. But I’m 39, and my family is younger than that, so we’re not in serious danger at the moment. Now, Leo Babuta is one of those Big Bloggers with a huge subscriber base, and when I think of all the young, self-improvement-prioritizers, mostly (aspiring) entrepreneurs reading this, and having them cancel their insurance and as Leo suggests build up savings/investment of at least a few thousand()for unexpected medical needs.I start shaking. Id be lying to say that this post didnt hit home in a very personal way for me. Like, a super very personal way. All my usual readers know that I was diagnosed with Stage Two breast cancer on Nov 25, 2011 at the age of 33. You can read what the last years been like for me here  if youre new around these parts, but the main points are that I did not carry the gene (despite a family history of cancer for every one of my relatives over the age of 70), I was down/upgraded to Stage One, I went through 2 lumpectomies + 4 rounds of chemo + a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction, and I was finally declared cancer-free on June 5th of this year. I thank my lucky stars each and every day that Im a heterosexual, married woman and that Ive been on my husbands (stellar) health insurance since I quit my corporate job in March of 2010. This year alone, I paid $4,649.49 (yes, I added up all my receipts) for tons of co-pays, insane amounts of medicine, an office visit for an out-of-network doctor, a trial to allow me to keep my hair (didnt work, but I still had to pay for it), a service that keeps my embryos frozen (cause chemo puts me into early menopause, and as a 33 year old without kids, my husband and I didnt want this option taken away from us), and 1 night in a private room in the hospital. Most of the large expenses were choices on my end: to try to keep my hair, to get a private hospital room, etc. I look at that figure and breathe a sigh of relief each and every day. Despite the cancer, I consider myself a lucky lady in every other regard. Now, I cant get the exact figures of what I would have had to pay sans insurance for all of my appointments, medications, and treatments, but I think you can get a taste of it based on the receipts I have that told me what I should have paid. Here they be: The pills that cost me $10 every time are listed on the receipt as costing $59.17, $105.25, $32.59, $45.99, $67.49, $77.49.so lets say 3-11 times what I pay for them, and I have at least 20 receipts from Walgreens for this year alone. Lets say, on average, I wouldve paid $1,000 for my pills and instead I paid $100. My plastic surgeons office visits + my breast reconstruction surgery cost $20,750. I paid $25. And keep in mind that this doesnt include the fee from the breast surgeonshe performs the first part of the surgery, and the plastic surgeon only does the reconstruction piece. I would think the entire surgery + office visits would be close to $50,000. I paid $50. My husband had to inject me with a syringe after each one of my chemo treatments, which costs $3,821.25. Times four (one for each round of chemo). My cost? $20 each. $100 total. Four visits to my oncologists office: $1,100. My cost? $100. Do we get where Im going here? Do I need to figure out the other charges and then put them up against what my husband and I were paying for our insurance every month and show how I saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while only shelling out a few thousand?    I dont think I do. Im sure you get the point. The $250,000 that Leo said you could save (in 20 years!) by investing your $380/month instead of spending it on insurance could be gone in a matter of weeks. Welcome to bankruptcy, or worse. I know this is getting long, but my point isnt done being made. Leo wrote that: So what if you get into a bad accident or get some unexpected disease? Isn’t this invitation for bankruptcy? Well, how often has this happened to you? In my 39 years, it’s never happened, and most people I know haven’t faced this either. Again, let’s use rational arguments instead of fear. Want some rational arguments, Leo?  Use me and my breast cancer diagnosis at 33 (and yes, doctors described me as young, thin and healthy even after the cancer diagnosis). Use my client and friend Steffanie, a young woman in her 30s who had to have brain surgery last year (no, she didnt have any of the Risks you talk about) that wouldve cost her $30K (and $5K/mo for medication) at a minimum. Use the 872 members in my Young Survival Coalition Facebook  group, all of us diagnosed under the age of 35. Use a close friends sister-in-law, a woman in her 30s or 40s (Im not sure of her exact age) who suffered a brain aneurysm just last week. Talk to Matthew Zachary who founded Stupid Cancer, an organization that works for the 72,000 (!!!!) young adults ages 15-39 who are diagnosed with cancer every year. And then? Talk to my friend and former client Lisa, a 34 year old who was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer just months after she lost her young husband to cystic fibrosis. Actually, you cant t alk to Lisa. She passed away three months ago. I think of her every day. Yes, we should all do what we can to make ourselves healthier. Exercise, eating few-to-no processed foods, not smoking, etc should be done by everyone (unsure where/how to start? Get this book STAT the content inside isnt as close to eye roll inducing as the name suggests). I agree. But just because you dont smoke, have protected sex, never drive, and are under the age of 50 doesnt mean that your health insurance is a bad bet. On the contrary indeed. Of course, everyone should pick the plan/deductible they feel comfortable with and hopefully Obamacare will pass and us entrepreneurs wont have outrageous costs for ourselves our families anymore and theres no need to pick the most expensive if you know youre relatively young, thin and healthy. Because, Leo? Anything can happen to anyone at any time at any age, no matter how many miles they run or green smoothies they consume every day. And one more thing. Its a bit of a petty point but I cant not say it. Your post is extremely condescending to myself and everyone I mentioned above those whose own actions did absolutely nothing to bring on their diseases. I had someone tell me that she thought cancer was brought on by stress.which implies that the patient brought the cancer on themselves. Its preposterous. And so is your advice. I would like to highly encourage you to take down your post, or at least update it with some of the facts, stories, and figures Ive given you here.  I invite you, Leo, to post your thoughts in the comments or send me an email at michelle(at)whenigrowupcoach(dot)com. Given your large audience base, I hope you take this responsibility seriously. As a young (thin and healthy) breast cancer survivor, I know I do. P.S. Leo, I just noticed that you said we should have regular screenings for cancer. The only such screening I know of is a genetic test that insurance wont pay for unless you prove that theres cause to give it to you (meaning you have a strong, early family history or youve been diagnosed yourself). I was told that it would be $8,000 out of pocket if I was rejected by insurance. Thankfully, I wasnt but I know others who have been. Do you mean a mammogram, or a biopsy? Please let me know if you know of any other cancer screenings that Im unaware of and dont cost thousands out of pocket. NOVEMBER 9th UPDATE: While I did not get a personal response from Leo, I was just alerted that he added an update to his post. He wrote: I’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback on this post. I’m OK with that, as I don’t expect everyone to agree with me and actually appreciate opposing viewpoints. It’s caused me to reconsider my recommendations in this post, so I’ll clarify my position here: I don’t recommend that most people forgo health insurance. This is what I believe is best for me and my family, and I offer this post as an alternative to the mainstream view. I hope you’ll give these ideas some thought, but don’t make decisions based on one person’s example. These issues are too important to just go with what I’m doing. While I wish that he would have rewrote the post so that this was expressed at the beginning of the article and that his accusatory tone would have softened to more of an opinion (as well as including points made above and in the comments: having the cost of his familys medical care fall on other people; the cost of mundane things like having babies and the sudden onset of asthma; the mental toll a bankruptcy-causing illness can take; the cost of needing ongoing medication; etc. The brilliance in these comments has not gone unnoticed, and I appreciate everyone who rose up with me this week). Im glad he at least added this disclaimer. I dont know what other negative feedback hes received, but I have a feeling hes heard all of us loud and clear. Now lets hope that impressionable entrepreneurs can separate what hes doing with whats best for them. If youre interested in hearing more about my self-employment/cancer/insurance roller-coaster this year, a video interview I did with Laura Simms on Oct 31st was posted yesterday. Good timing, huh? Click here in case you need more proof on the importance of being insured as an entrepreneur and/or you want to know how my cancer affected my workload, my self-care and my healthy habits its all there.