Gordon Barlow

Here's something we don't read about every day... Being unemployed (in our old age) my wife and I were obliged by law to have some kind of health insurance, and we signed up for the government plan, which covered in-patient care only; at $300 a month each. We'd been paying it for seven or eight years, ever since she was forced into retirement and we lost her private coverage. We paid the $600 p.m. cheerfully enough, reckoning that $7200 a year wasn't all that bad for us both to be covered against horrifically expensive hospitalisation fees. What a pleasant surprise, then, to get a phone call from the Health Services Authority a few months ago telling us that as from our next monthly payment (direct debit) our fee would be $167 each, instead of $300. And so it was.

How extraordinary, in this era of rising prices! I've no idea how they made their calculations; I didn't ask any questions...