Sometimes a Little Information Is Too Much Information

So my employer issues a weekly newsletter to its employees. About a quarter of what they send is information that someone thinks will be of use to us, and the rest are stories intended to make everyone feel good about working there. 

Today there was a story notifying everyone one that open benefits was about to start up and giving a heads up on some of the changes that we'd be seeing. 

Boy, howdy, was that information I really didn't need to be provided in the stripped down, bullet pointed format of the article. Frankly, it was terrifying. When your health care costs are running in the neighborhood of $25,000 a month (and with the addition of the irinotecan I wouldn't be surprised if that could double) being told that all of the health care plans are being modified so that 20% of the cost is the patient's responsibility is a little disconcerting. Start doing the math and it doesn't take much for the numbers to quickly add up to the point where what's coming in is less than what's going out -- especially since they're also reducing what short-term disability (which I'm on) pays out. 

Now granted, I would assume that there's some sort of maximum payout or other limiting factor that would prevent my health care costs from bankrupting me -- what's the point of having health insurance if there aren't -- but those details got filtered out of the brief article in the newsletter. I have to wait for the benefits brochure to come in the mail before I can find those details.

Which brings me back to my original point: I sort of wish they'd just said that the plans would be changing without trying to summarize how they'd be changing. At least in my case, the summary really isn't helpful.