Nope. I am very lucky in that regard. My coworkers donated enough vacation and sick time to me that I collected a paycheck the entire 3 months I was out of work. Which also enabled me to maintain my health insurance premiums. I had short term disability insurance also but after seeing those checks there is no way we could have made it on that alone. I'm actually very happy with pacificare, its my employer trying to get me off its payroll to save its money while I was out that pushed me to the extreme left on the health care reform issue. My employer has whats called "self funded" health care which was explained to me by a friends mom who works for pacificare this way. My employer pays pacificare to "manage" the health care program with any actual expenses being paid out by my employer. As you can see in my response to JermeyR, my employer got in a real big hurry to wipe me from the liability portion of its balance sheet.
At the time I was paying 180 dollars a month for my employer provided care, its gone up of course every year and my family has expanded so I'm paying about twice that now. I know when I checked out of the hospital (on good Friday!) the bill was in excess of 740,000 dollars. I don't know how much of that insurance actually paid. Also, I continued to go to out patient rehab for almost another 4 months, plus doctors visits, prescriptions, my last surgery in 2008 etc, so I assume the bill must total over a million dollars by now. I paid my premiums for almost 5 years before my accident and had never even seen a doctor till they wheeled my ass into the ER. I figured at one point that I had spent over 11,000 on insurance with out any out put on my employers end until I got hit.
