Ten years ago Mr. Quiggly decided to ignore his wife's idea of taking out family health insurance under the misguided opinion that the children were young and not likely to need health insurance for the foreseeable future and that both he and his wife were fit and healthy for their age.
Admittedly family health insurance can set you back a fair few dollars in monthly premiums and there is rarely any short term correlation between cost and benefit but then family health insurance is a long term insurance, a safety net for when things go wrong.
As you can imagine, things did go wrong. First there was little Jimmy who broke his leg in a bike accident. Mr. Quiggly was not too bothered, it hit the family finances hard for a few months but the cost was not that bad when compared to what he had saved in health insurance premiums. Within a few months they were back on track and the whole incident was forgotten.
Six months later Jimmy's little sister got taken ill, a virus she picked up from school which really wiped her out and meant that she had to spend nearly two weeks in hospital. When Mr. Quiggly realized how much it was going to cost he had to take out a long term loan. It was at this point the penny started to drop that if he had listened to his wife they would have had health insurance that would have covered all or most of the cost.
Everything ran smoothly for a year or so after that, no accidents and no illnesses. Mr. Quigley decided that he would hold off taking out family health insurance until he had paid off some of the loan. If he really thought about it he was hiring for a pay rise to help cover some of the health insurance premium.
He did indeed start looking into health insurance but only a couple of years later by which time his wife had been diagnosed with a long term illness so it had to be declared on the health insurance policy. Obviously the illness was an exclusion so the family had no health insurance for yet another health problem. A few years later it meant yet another loan that, by now, the family could ill afford to pay.
From that point on Mr.Quiggly was seen to be a keen advocate of health insurance with such support being driven by the $ 65,000 he had had to fork out in medical costs and the $ 38,000 he had yet to pay.