Owning a Hippopotamus

I have never owned a hippo. Would not have any idea how to go about buying one. The only hippo’s I have seen are in the zoo, or on a TV show and I have no idea what the steps are for finding a good hippo, buying it, and caring for it.

Hippo’s in the zoo are bought by someone else who I presume knows where to look for a good selection of hippo’s. I must also assume they know what is a good price on a hippo, what isn’t.

So how much do hippo’s cost any way?

Is $1500 too much or is $10,000 not enough?

How do you know you are getting a good hippo? I suppose if nothing goes wrong in the first few weeks you got a healthy hippo. Or maybe you have to wait a year or more to find out if the hippo really was healthy.

I suppose all of these are good questions, but then I have never talked to a hippo buyer so I don’t know what questions to ask in negotiating for a hippo.

So what has buying a hippo have to do with health insurance?

Most of the folks I know have never bought health insurance before. They usually worked for a place and someone at their company was the hippo, I mean health insurance buyer. They have no idea how much the health insurance costs, at least not until they get their COBRA bill. Most of the time they don’t even know what the plan covers and what it doesn’t. They usually know what the doc & Rx copay is but nothing beyond that. They think they have a $500 deductible but it could be $1500. They just assume everything over the deductible is covered in full, but they really don’t know.

So why are these folks, who have never bought health insurance before, suddenly experts in buying health insurance? What questions do they ask? What is a good price? How do they know they got a good plan or a bad one?

They would be just as effective trying to buy a hippo.

This entry was posted on April 25, 2006 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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