Sandy -

The argument with UHC is that if ketamine "cures" you, which might be read as a normal life with monthly boosters, $35,000 up front with maybe another $6,000/year for boosters is peanuts compared to the "present value" of another 16 years of healthcare spending (including Rx meds) at the rate you've probably been going over the last few years. This argument is particularly effective with the Employee Benefits Dept., if, as is not uncommon practice but unknown to the subscribers, the employer is actually self-insured and using the insurance company simply as its claims agent, such that each month/week the employer writes one check for what the carrier has paid out as a whole, along with an agreed management fee.

And I didn't pull 16 years out of the hat: at age 49, that's when your coverage probably switches over to Medicare. (Although who knows what year of age that might be extended to in the meantime, in what could amount to the ultimate budget balancing trick.)

And for those who want to know, "present value" is defined as the value on a given date of a future payment or series of future payments, discounted to reflect the time value of money and other factors such as investment risk. Check out the Wikipedia article for the formulas, if you want to see them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value

And for a insurance companies, this stuff is second nature. The easiest example being so-called "structured settlements," where instead of a plaintiff collecting $X as a lump sum, and taking a huge tax hit to the extent that part of it is deemed by the IRS to have been paid for the present value (PV) of what would have been his or her's anticipated income stream to age 67+/-, the parties agree that the carrier will make a stream of annual payments, typically having a PV somewhat less than X (thereby saving the carrier money, assuming it has wisely predicted long-term interest rates) while the plaintiff, in turn, pays taxes at a lower marginal rate on the lost earnings component of the annual payment, such that the PV of the stream of the plaintiff's after tax NET payments is greater than what s/he would have received after taxes in a lump sum. (One of the issues for the plaintiff being in insuring continued payments even if the carrier goes belly up, sometimes done with a letter of credit issued by a "too big to fail" bank). But now I REALLY digress . . .

Mike