Ten years without Health Insurance 1995-2004
For the first three years of our marriage we had some health insurance coverage that we bought since the place I worked did not provide insurance. If I remember correctly it only cost around $600 to have Ben and by the time we had Brittany it was several thousand. When I went to work at Signetics the coverage was excellent and covered probably all but about $600 of the cost for Briittany. I am roughly remembering these figures and could be off by some degree. The whole point of it is though is that we had excellent coverage while I was employed by Signetics and when they shut down in 1993 it would have cost me nearly $800 a month to stay with their medical plan. We found a new plan with IHC but it still cost around $400 a month and as I went from working a $12.00 an hour job to $0 for a time I finally had to drop all health insurance. We then went from 1995 to 2004 without any insurance. This was the period of time that we sent three of our four sons into the mission field and because of the Church Insurance were able to get coverage for them in the field. But at home it was a bit different story. This was a period of our marriage when we recognized some of the Lord’s greatest blessings in our behalf. Both Jeff and Hayden had to have surgery on their ankles, Jeff was paralyzed for a short time due to a soccer accident, Loren was diagnosed with Diabetes and not a whole lot else. In other words we were really blessed since all of the children played soccer during this time and could have sustained major injuries. Then when it was time to do the surgeries on the ankles it was performed by the father of one of the other soccer teammates and he didn’t charge us anything. We had some cost with the anethiesist but it was still less than $1500.00. When Loren was diagnosed with diabetes however we saw blessings come in another way in that in 2 days we were able to secure health coverage that would cover his hospital stay in the ICU. I look back and think about all that could have happened and realize that when the Lord promises to open the windows of Heaven he does it in ways that we usually don’t recognize that are not always tied directly to money but rather are tied directly to good health and welfare for our families. He has certainly blessed us through the years and this particular set of years it becomes very apparent that there are other ways that He does it for us.
