Keep this in mind while you try to navigate Healthcare.gov: You really may not need this.
If you’re young, relatively healthy and low on funds — struggling to get a decent job and paying high student loans, while there’s still helium in the “Happy Graduation!” balloons, buying health insurance may be a big mistake.
It’s not just that the system seems even less reliable than your flaky painter friend’s Etsy store. It’s that you’re likely to lose money this way — even if you get sick.
Why pay into a system you probably won’t benefit from?
For some people, it’s obvious: If you’re under 26 and your parents have insurance, you can go on their plan, maybe paying them for whatever it adds to their cost, and call it a day.
For others, buying a health policy may not be worth re-tooling an already-tight budget. You could easily be better off sticking with pay-as-you-go for now, and eating the penalty. (It’s only $95 the first year, or 1 percent of your adjusted gross income, whichever’s higher, then rises in later years.)
Most young people don’t need much care. Lots of younger men don’t even bother with annual checkups, and many don’t do more than that — and it’s not just because they think they’re invincible. Why would such a guy pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year just for the ease of walking into a doctor’s office once with little-to-no cost?
Young women are more likely to see a doctor at least once, and the yearly exam (the 10 minutes you wish you were a dude) can cost up to $500. But even with what you might shell out for birth control, it can still be cheaper than the total cost of insurance — which may not cover the doctor you want to see, anyway.
So why not find a doctor you like and pay in cash for simple, one-off treatments?
Yes, people with chronic conditions or otherwise needing expensive medication or frequent check-ups may have to slog through the Web site and pay up.
But for anyone under 35 who can’t remember the last time they had a physical, why bother?
Hey, they’ll tell you, healthy people have to get insurance to cover the costs of the sick and elderly. Sorry, our generation has been paying into Social Security since we got our teenage working papers, and we won’t see a dime of it by the time our own retirements roll around. Why fund this, too?
Working as a waitress in my early 20s, I couldn’t afford to pay the $400 or so insurance was going to cost; it was a huge chunk of my monthly pay. So I didn’t.
When I got a bad head cold, it was $100 for the visit, and a generic prescription for antibiotics was free at a participating pharmacy. (My doctor tipped me off to this when I said I didn’t have coverage.)
When I broke my wrist snowboarding, I found myself wishing I did have coverage — at first. I had to fork over what ended up being about $3,000 over a few weeks — a tough number to swallow and one that made me feel stupid to boot.
It was an expensive lesson to learn — but about not throwing yourself down a mountain at high speeds if you’re uninsured and inexperienced. I was still better off without insurance.
I paid the hospital in interest-free installments (which they set up for me with zero bureaucratic hassle) and the physical therapy/orthopedic office in cash for each visit. It still added up to less than paying into health insurance for that year. And it was my choice.
With the money I saved every year, I helped my parents keep our family above water after my father was laid off. In better times, I traveled the country with friends going to festivals.
Yes, I took a risk. If you want to be covered for surprise catastrophes, like a bad car crash, then go ahead and pay through the nose.
But if you feel like you’re getting scammed, remember you have the freedom to listen to your gut.
Gabrielle Grilli works on The Post’s editorial pages.