Since this thread has turned into "what's even the point of health insurance anyway", I'll toss my anecdotal experiences onto the pile. I'm 40, wife is 33, we have a 7 and a 4 year old. Wife works for the State of Nebraska, so we have pretty good coverage (self-insured managed by UHC), and we pay about $550/month in premiums. Since the state's fiscal year runs July 1-June 30, those are also the dates our insurance calendar are set. Since our youngest was born in September 2020, we have hit the family OOP max every year, and by the end of December in each year (6 months into the plan year). Youngest daughter got 3 sets of tubes, and the first set coincided with her being in the hospital for 5 days with RSV in the 20-21 plan year. 21-22, doctors found a quite rare "aggressively benign" tumor in her spine that necessitated her going to MD Anderson for treatment, and eventually had a bone graft and spinal fusion surgery, so that helped us hit that OOP max for the 21-22 and 22-23 years. Last year (2023), I had back surgery in August for a herniated disk, and by December it had failed, so I got a spinal fusion for Christmas, and there's the OOP max for the 23-24 year. This year, we haven't hit the family OOP max yet, but I did blow through mine because after the surgery, my body decided it didn't wanna to replenish the iron, and the anemia landed me in the hospital for 3 weeks in August.
Now, we've been paying that $550ish a month since July 2017, so had we been "banking" that money instead of paying for insurance, we'd have just shy of $50k saved up by now, or enough to pay for the cheapest of the 4 surgeries that my wife and I had in calendar year 2024.
And oh yeah, until that herniated disk decided to screw me up for a year and a half (so far), I ran 3 half marathons a year, my cholesterol is lower than what I weighed when I graduated high school, and neither my wife nor I have any chronic health conditions.
