Health Insurance or Russian Roulette for the Self-Employed

It's a beautiful Saturday morning and before I have my next attack of housekeeping I want to talk about getting old(er).  Here are a few things I don't understand and probably never will:

Lindsay Lohan.  Who is she and why should I care?  (I do get Paris Hilton.  I see her as this era's Edie Sedgwick, with better rehab options and without the Mayflower cred.)

Or Lady Gaga.  Ditto.

Or why Twitter matters.  (The Japanese invented haiku and any talkative 4 year old is an exemplar of non-consequential chatter, so why do I need Twitter?)

Or paying the equivalent of a house note for health insurance and still having a deductible so high that it's as if I weren't paying insurance at all.  (Every few months I get the equivalent of an F-bomb of a bill from some physician's practice, or some lab for work that was done long ago.  Sigh.)  When people are diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness one of the questions that caroms through the mind is:  What did I do?  Could I have prevented this if only I did X or Y?  Will people add:  "What if I had affordable health insurance?  Maybe this wouldn't have happened."

As bad as it is to pay for health insurance out of pocket what's worse is not having it at all.  Years ago Husband No. 1 was doing a kitchen for a client on Long Island.  He didn't like the client, and he didn't like the kitchen.  One Saturday he drove there from Brooklyn, against his will or better judgment, to work on the job.  From what I've gathered he was both mad and bored.  Add distracted to the mix along with a running table saw and voila, he makes a nice 45 degree slice through the fingers of his left hand.  He and the carpenter he was working with pick up his fingers.  (Contractor's Rule No. 1:  clean up your job site when you are done for the day.)  Luckily, the next door neighbor was an EMT.  He wraps what was a hand up and Husband No. 1 is helicoptered to a Long Island Hospital.  The surgeons were thrilled to see him.  They get so many motorcyle accident middle-aged hot dogs that they're bored piecing those fools back together.  Here was something exciting!  Fingers to be reattached so that the patient can make a fist and hold a pencil.  Wooo-Hoo!!

After some very good surgery and weekly visits to a very good physical therapist HN1 regained almost full use of his hand.  (Funny gross out moment:  While tissue and bone are growing the fingers have to be kept straight.  To do this pins the diameter of paperclips are inserted in each finger.  One day buttoning his shirt cuff I accidentally caught one of the pins and pulled it out.  By the time you can pull a clean pin out the finger's close to healing, but still ...  I wished then he liked polo shirts half as much as he did button-downs.)

Re-attaching HN1's fingers qualifies as a success story you'd think.  A man can continue his work and he won't scare the little children, what could be better than that?  Except that this EMTing, and helicoptering and surgery and PT was done on a man who did not have a lick of health insurance.  So not only was he left with having to go back to Long Island to clean up all that blood in the client's kitchen (which the thought of still makes me laugh as in Annals in the History of Renovations From Hell) but we had our own metaphorical blood to clean up which was a $35,000 and counting bill.

Lesson learned.

There are so many things I'd love to be doing during my favorite season, and shopping around for health insurance is not one of them but given the choice between something we can afford (at least until 2014) and sounding like an old crank because I don't understand the aforementioned phenomena, well guess what I'll be doing?