I am always amused by questionnaires designed to reveal whether we have enough money to last a lifetime. They are intended to help us plan for retirement. Yes, many of you are too young to worry about this, but humor me. One of the questions is some version of “How long are you going to live.” Another asks, “How much money do you expect to spend each year (for the rest of your life)?” Those questions are often enough to make us stop trying to fill out the form. Why?

Because we don’t know and it’s too scary to think about.

Which brings up the problem of choosing a medical or health insurance policy. I will use the words “medical” and “health” interchangeably to describe this insurance. I intend to target only two aspects of making a choice of health coverage, each of which follows from the questions above.

Simply put:

1. We can’t predict how much health insurance we will need because we lack a crystal ball about our future health.
2. Both psychological and intellectual roadblocks make it difficult to choose a policy. Thinking about illness and death, hospitals and doctors, is scary.

Despite all the words spoken about health insurance in the USA, no one discusses these two points and how they complicate the debate over what should be the federal government’s role, if any, in providing medical insurance for citizens.

I am therefore taking on the job. Again, humor me. This is important.

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Lots of adults in the USA still get medical insurance from an employer, who might also insure the spouse and children. Most of you in the rest of the Western World receive government sponsored evaluation and treatment. But, historically speaking (if you are not disabled or “low-income”), in my country there are three choices other than a plan for which the employer pays a big chunk:

1. Decide you don’t need or can’t afford medical insurance.
2. Buy a policy on your own, one sold by an association (for example, by your college’s alumni program), or one offered in your state-run online marketplace.
3. If you are a senior, sign up for Medicare, which is the coverage you get if your employer deducted a portion of your salary to make you eligible once you were old enough.

Our politics is dominated by the question of who makes the choice. Are you free not to buy medical insurance? Are you free to choose the kind of policy you want? One that pays for nearly all medical/psychological conditions or only some? Are you free to assume you won’t need certain medical/psychological services?

Some of the voices in this argument imply this is a rational choice, much like deciding whether you want to buy a car or prefer public transportation; and, if you do want a car, what model might you enjoy and how much are you willing to pay.

In fact, however, the decision is more complicated and not fully rational. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, a sociologist named Ernest Becker, and psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski have raised the issue of our discomfort with even the idea of mortality, let alone facing the reality of serious disease. Moreover, those social scientists created a body of research demonstrating our unconscious flight from the terror of our own personal end. No wonder Ernest Becker called his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. No wonder the three psychologists do research on Terror Management Theory: not about terrorism, but the terror of knowing you will someday die.

Are you still reading or have you thrown a sheet over your computer screen?

If we cannot frankly face death without a secret shiver and a turning away, how then can we make rational choices about what health care we need or will need?

Will you or your child get depressed, need psychotherapy, or psychotropic medication? Become addicted? Have an accident? Face an unplanned pregnancy and need maternity and pediatric care? Be taken to the ER? Require a vaccination? Encounter a chronic, expensive illness?

No crystal ball, eh?

Few people seek out these unwelcome thoughts. We put them out of our minds when our health is good. Indeed, we must surely have inherited the ability to distract ourselves from life’s dystopian downside. Had our ancestors, broadly speaking, not had such an attitude, they wouldn’t have survived and we wouldn’t be here. They needed to attend to all the immediate tasks of living. “What if I get sick?” was not the most helpful question when the crops needed planting and harvesting.

A certain bravery is to be found in this optimism toward life. The attitude must come from half of our species, the fair sex bearing our children; those who (to quote W.E.B. DuBois) risked their lives and bodies “to win a life, and won.”

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Illness and mortality are prospects most of us compartmentalize unless we are battling them. We will acknowledge the concerns, but in an abstract, impersonal way. They are “out there,” or “might happen someday,” but not today. We give these inevitabilities their own separate room within our psychic space, building the structure with bricks and mortar, double thick, the more to keep our emotions and thoughts untroubled. We wall-off potential weaknesses of our psyche and flesh, put them in isolation where we cannot be turned to stone by the prospect of serious illness, as if we faced Medusa.

My office manager routinely checked insurance benefits for new patients when I was in practice. Why? Because they usually did not know about their coverage. Some, in fact, were saddened and surprised to discover they had no therapy benefits and their insurance paid only for physical issues; that is, until the law required attention to mental illness.

Understand, please, my patients were almost all of average or greater intelligence. Still, most lacked knowledge of potential holes in what they considered to be their healthcare safety net. They trusted they were “well-covered.” Perhaps an insurance salesman told them so or their employer did the same. Or, maybe, after the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) became law, someone assured them therapy was among the “essential health benefits” in their insurance contract. In the latter case, they did, indeed, have counseling benefits. Again, however, they tended not to know the details.

We live, as humanity always has, in a world requiring a significant amount of faith in other people. What I’m getting at, however, is more than trusting whoever designed your insurance or whoever is offering the product. In order to make thoughtful decisions about medical insurance we must face the issue of illness and mortality squarely, without evasion or distraction; and with a level of experience, intellect, and even specialized knowledge to do the job. We must do this despite our tendency toward mental and emotional evasion of illness and death.

To quote the title of a Tom Stoppard play, what we have here is The Hard Problem.

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The top image is a Saddlebred Stallion in Harness by Jean. Balloons in a Car Lot in Normal, Illinois, by ParentingPatch, is followed by Caravaggio’s The Head of Medusa. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.