Why you should (probably) have an HDHP

If you're young (20s especially, 30s maybe) and relatively healthy (i.e. you only use your health insurance for annual exams and maybe 1-2 low-cost prescriptions per month), you probably should have a high deductible health plan (HDHP) with an HSA.

Here's what that means:

1. An HDHP, as the name implies, has a high deductible (usually $3000 or more per year). Your deductible is the amount that you pay at the doctor's office for healthcare before your insurance kicks in. If you only use your insurance for preventive healthcare (check-ups), it means you never touch your deductible, because preventive care is generally free to you as part of your insurance.

2. An HSA (health savings account) is a bank account-like vehicle that you contribute to to cover health-related expenses. The money that you put in an HSA is pre-tax (meaning that the money comes out of your paycheck before you pay taxes on your income), which means you pay less in taxes. E.g. let's say your paycheck is $1000 per pay period and you pay 15% in taxes (so you get $850 in your bank account each paycheck). If you decide to contribute $100 to an HSA, that comes out first and goes into your HSA account, and then you pay 15% tax on $900 (so you get $765 in your bank account each paycheck). So you've put aside $100 for health stuff, but you only "lose" $85 from your paycheck! Because of this, there's a limit to what you can contribute to it per year (this changes each year, currently it's about $3850 for a single person).

3. Money that you put into an HSA is yours to use for any health-related expense, forever. This includes: buying medicine at a pharmacy, dental expenses, eye exams, glasses or contacts. [It does not, however, include gym memberships, sadly.] So if you go to the dentist for a root canal, and it costs $500, your dental insurance pays $300, you can use your HSA to pay the rest, even though the account is part of your health insurance and not your dental insurance.

4. Many HSA accounts have an investment option, meaning that your money could earn more money while you're not using it, increasing the amount of money that you have for health-related expenses later in life. Those gains (money earned from investments) are not taxed either. The only time you pay taxes on HSA money is if you withdraw money for a non-health-related expense, then you have to pay a penalty.

5. Your premium (the amount that you, yourself pay for insurance, usually deducted from your paycheck directly) is significantly lower with an HDHP than a "regular" insurance plan (HMO/PPO/etc), because you're taking on the cost of funding your HSA, which again, means less money coming out of your paycheck. Sometimes, your employer may also contribute to your HSA to help manage this difference.

Here's where the biggest advantage is. If you contribute the max to your HSA annually, but you never really use it (because you're young and healthy), when you're older and have health complications (and this includes giving birth to a child), you already have money put away and you don't have to worry about how you'll pay the $30000 it costs to give birth without complications in the US (yes, this is really the current average cost of childbirth). This is a great thing to build up now so that at the very least, you have a healthcare safety net for when shit goes sideways. Also, if you decide to switch to a different health plan that's not HSA eligible, you still have that money and you can continue to use it, you just can't put more money into the HSA account.

March Reading List

These books might change your life

• Mem by Bethany C Morrow

• Soft Magic by Upile Chisala

• Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab

• Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

• One by Kathryn Otoshi

• Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

• Severance by Ling Ma

Find the complete list at Bookshop or on Amazon.

For me, a book with the potential to be life-changing is one that gives you a new perspective on some aspect of your life. It offers a practice that could be transformative, or an insight into a life that I’d never otherwise get to see, or a way of looking at the world that changes something fundamental about my understanding of it. These books offer one or more of these things.

While the the list is mostly non-fiction, my fiction picks on this list were books that left me in wonderment at what the author managed to convey. Mem is a slim work of speculative fiction that questions what is it that makes us whole humans. How do our life experiences, good and bad, shape us into who we are? Can we be ourselves outside of these experiences? What about the things the rock our worlds down to the core? Severance tells a story of surviving a pandemic that turns out to be apocalyptic, and asks us to consider our relationship with our careers, and how much we define ourselves by our ability to keep showing up, even when everything is falling apart.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a book of questions and advice that changed the way I think about how we ask questions. Often the question that we ask isn’t necessarily the thing we’re looking for advice about, there’s often a question behind the question, and feelings that we’re trying to address by actions. Set Boundaries, Find Peace does something similar with boundaries: we often have the language to set boundaries with others, but we struggle with feeling guilty about setting a boundary, so we look for language that will prevent others from reacting in negative ways. This book empowers us to do the work of setting boundaries.

Sometimes, we face burnout because there are areas in our lives that do not allow us to set boundaries, or to find rest. In Too Heavy a Yoke, Dr. Walker-Barnes takes us through the ways that the Strong Black Woman trope is doing serious harm to Black women. Soft Magic, serves to remind Black women that we are more than strong, that Blackness is a thing to be celebrated, that our humanity is complex and beautiful. Finally, the children’s book on this list, One, reminds us the big change starts with small actions, sometimes, just one person who stands up to a bully.

Choose one or a few of these books to read through, and see what comes up for you. One, and Mem are pretty short, Severance will suck you in, and Soft Magic and Tiny Beautiful Things can be read piecemeal. Take your time through Set Boundaries, Find Peace and Too Heavy a Yoke, to sit with all of the things you’ll encounter in those books.

Happy reading!