I was about to write today's post as a cute little diatribe about the color pink and how awesome Emma looks in everything but that color, but we arrived home today to see these waiting for us. I was speechless. It was 7 envelopes full of insurance bills. Now I looked at all of these and thought , holy crap, I am SO glad we have the gold plated healthcare coverage from Uncle Bill. This really got me thinking...

There were so many thoughts, going thru my head, so I figured I should just rely on data then interpret the results. I dug up every single bill I could find relating to the birth of Emma and Ella. It took me a while to compile every bill and place them into Excel, but I figured it would be worth it. I condensed each bill as a single claim, when in actuality each bill contains more than one claim, but that's just insurance speak. Let's get to my not-so-scientific statistical analysis:

Number of bills to date: 168 Largest Bill to date: $66,643 Amt paid by Microsoft for that bill: $37,874 Avg bill size: $2,082 Avg paid by MS: $1,016

now lets get to the really juicy numbers....

Total billed to date: $349,857 Total paid by MS: $170,701 Total percentage paid by MS: 48.8%

Not quite million dollar babies, but we are getting there. Now, I know what you're thinking. What happened to the rest of the costs? They were negotiated away. That's right, they just disappeared. Here's where we get to the analysis of the data...

Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world. They are self-insured and wield great power when working with Premera Blue Cross and the healthcare system. Thus, they are able to negotiate rates down to a more reasonable amount. In our case the savings was $179,156! WOW. Now here's the boneheaded thing... now, I know we couldn't pay this off, but we are not poor either. I love our MS healthcare...but what about those who can't afford healthcare? Yep, you guessed it... no insurance means no negotiation. Uninsured patients would be responsible for a large majority of that $349,000 (or it would fall on us taxpayers). Doesn't something seem wrong here?

Well, Ellen is bugging me to grab some food and she's pissed about the mess I just made with the bills. I've uploaded the Excel doc to my server. Go have a look at the data yourself and draw your own conclusions about the healthcare in the US.

Updated: Dummy me. I never told you what Ellen and I paid so far. It's actually quite a bit...something close to zero...ok, it actually is ZERO. Not a penny. Yep, nada. Zilch.

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