Gustavo Bendeck, a 62-year-old physician assistant from Lubbock, Texas, saw 46 patients at his rural health clinic on March 28. About a dozen were "flying blind," his term for being uninsured.
He’s flying blind with them.
Last November, Bendeck and his wife Shirley received a letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas telling them that their $1,000-a-month premium was more than doubling to $2,200. Shirley asked Bendeck what would happen next.
“I’m not going to pay this amount of money,” he told her. He looked for other comparable plans, but most wanted about the same. He makes about $117,000 a year after taxes, he said. He and his wife are healthy, so they decided to chance it.
Life hasn’t changed too much since, though they have a little more free cash even though the prescriptions they both take cost more without insurance. Shirley takes a cholesterol drug and a blood-pressure treatment that together cost about $350 a month, more than double when they had insurance coverage. Gustavo takes a blood-pressure drug that costs $70 to $80 for a 90-day supply, compared to $20 when he was insured.
“My wife is a little more antsy than I am about not having insurance, it worries her,” Bendeck said. “What keeps me calmer is that there’s a lot of us out there that do not have insurance.”
He sees them every day at his clinic, and often works to find them the best price on expensive services like an MRI scan. If he or Shirley needs it, he thinks he can do the same.
“You learn how to develop those kind of networks over time to help your patients,” he said.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.