I’m Canadian. And I’m already sorry for asking an ignorant question.
I know you have to pay for hospital visits in the states. I know lower economic status can come with lower access to birth control and sex education. But then, how do they afford to give birth? Do people ever avoid hospital visits because they don’t feel like they can’t afford it?
Do hospitals put people on a payment plan? Is it possible to give birth and not pay if you don’t have the means? How does it work in the states?
How does it all work?
Again. Canadian. And sorry.
I told gf I don’t see how we can afford one kid yet alone the 3 she wants. And a house in SoCal. Then the family trips she imagines. I have a masters and 20 yrs experience in engineering. Seems like if I don’t get aggressive it’ll never happen. She doesn’t make much and when drunk said she just wants to be a stay at home mom.
Edit: I was just talking about general cost of how to afford, not insurance of birth costs. Also I guess it’s really 15 yrs since masters, I included prior jobs and internships. I’m almost 40. Under 150k.
If you have a masters and 20 years of experience, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a job that has the health insurance to pay for all of that. If you don’t, then you need a new job
If they’ve got a masters and 20 years of experience they’re either a genius or almost 50 years old. Children are already a huge commitment, being older makes it that much harder
I have 15 years of experience in software engineering, but that’s only because I started when I was 12. Experience is experience. Now, if they meant professional experience that’s a bit different
Health insurance still leaves you with a large bill. Expect like $10k for the hospital part for a lot of insurances. Don’t forget the obgyn visits throughout the pregnancy (probably only $25-$75 per visit, depending on if you need a specialist). Labs are extra. In fact, the one that really tells a lot of info (lots of recessive gene issues can be found with it) is like a $750 lab that insurance doesn’t usually pay for (“it’s too new, and not required”).
I have 2 children. Insurance covered almost everything. The out of pocket expenses for the hospital were something like $700, not thousands. For doctor’s visits it was just the $20 co-pay for each visit, and all the labs were fully covered.
Good insurance! Our child born this year the hospital bill looks like around $8k after insurance, but we keep getting other bills from the provider’s offices so it’s hard to say exactly. Fortunately my wife has a secondary insurance of some sort we can submit the $8k to get that knocked down to hopefully $4k. If it works. It’s been months trying to get it sorted.
This year? Check out the no surprise bill (federal). Those extra bills might not be legal
I had an 8k bill for a TIA I had last year. It’s a lot of money, but if you have a job that will cover most of your hospital bills, you can probably pay for it without drowning
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s a good system
Yea my bad on my comment, I was just talking about general cost of how to afford not insurance of birth costs. Also I guess it’s really 15 yrs since masters, I included prior jobs and internships.
Sure, maybe the hospital bills but raising 3 kids and going on vacations every year? You’re talking multi million dollar salary to be able to afford all of that on one income in SoCal of all places
Then… Don’t live in SoCal?
Leave California and this all becomes possible with your salary.
When he leaves California, he will leave his salary too (and possibly his industry too)
It will still be more affordable. We couldn’t afford to live in SoCal after my daughter was born. We moved back to Indiana where we grew up and, as awful as Indiana is in many ways, at least we could afford to buy a house.
not if its a remote job…
Remote doesn’t pay the same if you’re not in a HCOL area. Most jobs scale based on location
Yea well where I live out of staters have been scamming their states and companies for years. I know a guy who works for the California educational system but lives here.
I live in SoCal and love it, and do not intend to have kids, but it really seems like you’d be struggling to raise 3 kids around here on less than $150k (2 cars, rent/mortgage, etc).
Obviously many people manage it somehow, but it must be incredibly stressful. I have no idea how most of them do it.
I’m convinced many have family money
Here you go. This might answer some questions you have https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-im-pregnant-or-plan-to-get-pregnant
Healthcare in the US generally screws the middle, not the poor, even then it’s the lower middle. The poor qualify for Medicaid which generally pays for anything major and basic healthcare, though options may be limited. The old get Medicare which covers pretty much everything outside a nursing home for fairly little out of pocket. The middle and upper class generally has decent insurance that isn’t crazy expensive to have and doesn’t have a ton of out of pocket costs provided by an employer.
It’s the people with high deductible plans that can’t or won’t contribute to an hsa, and those that don’t have employer provided healthcare that really get screwed.
Idk where your coming from but as someone who had $12k in an HSA and employer medical that’s bs.
I went to the eye doctor and needed glasses. Tried using my HSA. Nope. Not an approved medical expense. Tried paying a copay at the er. Nope not an approved medical expense. Wife got a kidney stone removed via surgery. Wanted to pay coinsurance. Nope not an approved medical expense. I needed a cpap for my sleep apnea. Nope not an approved medical expense. Year rolled over and all that money disappeared. I asked where it went and was told I either used it or lost it. So I got rid of it. Fucking garbage.
As for the employer coverage, we had a zero dollar deductible plan. My wife gave birth last year. Ambulance ride from her work? Nope, not necessary. All the gyno visits? Nope, not necessary. The ER visit when she slipped and fell at 6 months? Nope, not necessary. The 2 week hospital stay when she went preeclamptic? Nope, not necessary. The delivery? Nope, not necessary. The NICU stay for our premature daughter? Nope, not necessary.
I payed $1700 per PAY for my health insurance and they didn’t cover a cent from our entire family last year. We racked up over $70k in medical debt. Our MOOP was $5k/$10k and they said none of it applied.
Hospital sent it to collections because we couldn’t fit their minimum payment of $9k/mth (fuck duke lifepoint but this is an insurance rant). We complained to the pa board of health insurance and were advised to get a lawyer but no lawyer would take it. They said it would be years to get anything back, let alone the full amount.
We ended up proving that my employer doesn’t offer comprehensive insurance. The main component is covering pre and post natal care which they claim to, but they deny every time. So now we have insurance through penni for $60/mth with government help. Oh and we went through bankruptcy to get rid of the collections debt.
Fuck Cigna, fuck duke lifepoint, fuck insurance, fuck for profit healthcare, fuck the American healthcare system.
I mean yeah fuck insurance but everyone of those things you listed is definitely covered by HSA. I use my HSA every year for glasses, hospital bills and doctors appointments. also it sounds like you had an FSA since you lost what you didn’t spend. HSA has rollover. But all those expenses you listed are also eligible for FSA.
Sorry for the late reply, I typically browse on Artemis and notifications are broke.
But ya, that was my point. You can have “good” insurance but whats covered is still up to them. They can deny whatever they want and get away with it because no one wants to fight back. Every one of those things are legitimate medical purchases but they don’t care because there is nothing to enforce payment. So they deny everything to keep your money and give you nothing in return.
Those are definitely all HSA things, and something I use mine for all the time. Dunno how it worked for you but I basically just have a debit card I can use that has my HSA balance on it. Functions like any other card.
I had to give an account number for my purchases and they billed it like insurance. Then they would call me and harass me for miss using the card and demand a ton of business information that they could just ask the business for. I would need to get EIN numbers from my eye doctors and stuff to get them to believe it was a business. Then they would tell me they can’t authorize it and garnish my wages as “repayment”
Same with any hospital visit here afaik. Most hospitals have a loophole if you can’t pay, you can dispute the fees, they check your income, etc… like others have said I think it affects your credit score either way. But it’s all part of the privatized healthcare grift.
Some people give birth in their own homes like in medival times. I know people who have done it. In my opinion people shouldn’t be having kids if society is so broken you have to do stuff like this but to each their own.
We opted to have our second at home in a birthing pool, it was amazing! Mum and baby were monitored way more than when we were in the hospital with our first, and we could just recover and relax in our own home after. No stressing about having to get to the hospital etc.
Hell they’re trying to take our choice in the matter.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Thats what midwives are for.
Until it goes wrong.
Once there’s a kid in the equation then it’s pretty easy to get on state paid insurance. It’s even easier now with so called Obamacare in the equation (Affordable Care Act). If you qualify, then you’ll have free neonatal care, free gyno visits, and free delivery and hospital services. It’s not great insurance, like you’ll be at the community hospital and not some swanky private birthing center, but it’s not bad either. Medi-Cal, the California state insurance is actually pretty good for child care and birthing services. They pay for hearing aids too, which only 3% of private insurances pay for. So medical care when you’re poor and have a kid is decent in the States. Now that there’s Obamacare it’s decent even without a kid. Where it falls short is if you’re under-insured as a middle class citizen, and it’s pretty easy to be uninsured, even with expensive plans.
Vaginally
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Do people ever avoid hospital visits
At least in my experience, we’ll generally be able to go to the hospital
Do hospitals put people on a payment plan
Generally, I’ve just seen the debt transferred to a debt collection agency afterwards, since there’s no money for them to take. They’ll harass you, and it affects your credit score, but they can’t send you to jail
Credit score? Is it like the Chinese social credit system?
At this point, pretty much
As the name hints, a credit score is used to rate the risk of making you a loan. It’s not some essential personal ID. It only comes into play if you are applying for credit and is a set of shared records that financial institutions and private companies use to decide if loaning you money is a good risk or not.
Someone else said it’s used to decide if you can get a car and that’s not accurate. If you need to borrow money to buy a car, your credit history will be checked. It’s the loan, not the car.
Is it crazy that lenders would want to know if you’ve walked away from your bills in the past? Making it sound like dystopian China is a gross exaggeration.
Landlords want to know if you will be able to pay rent and they may ask to know what you earn, what’s in your bank account, and if you have insane debt. It’s not credit per se but they are entering into a financial agreement with you which you could default on, so it’s got many of the same characteristics. Don’t want to give all this information? Don’t. It’s not required by law. Not everyone demands it. Some may choose not to rent to you without it.
Yeah, just the American version
It affects where you can rent housing, what houses you can buy, whether you can get a car, etc
Not only American. We in Germany have shit like that and most other European nations have it as well afaik
It exists in most places from what I can tell, but the specific implementation may differ
The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between
“when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that” in Europe (at least my country) and
“credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you’re screwed if it’s bad because half of everything runs on credit”.
There’s also the fact that credit rating agencies in North America have hardly any supervision and are prone to make mistakes because they take correlated data by face value.
I think my credit report still says I work at “DOMINOES” after like 5 years of not being there. It doesn’t effect anything, but I get mild amusement out of it being misspelled on top of that.
Love how everyone went insane with the social credit score while you got the same shit done to you and no one batted an eye
My favorite part is when one of the three companies that does ours leaked all of our data with relatively no consequences.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement
It’s not comparable at all. In the US your credit score only goes down if you borrow money and don’t pay it back. If you get a loan and pay it back on time your credit score will be fine.
I’m not super familiar with the Chinese credit system, but I think it’s effected by a lot more. What kind of products you buy, how much you work, posting certain content online, etc.
Yes these systems are not in any way whatsoever comparable to each other except in being reputation rating systems.
“What? A bank wants to know if you defaulted on the last loan you took? What is this?? Totalitarian China???”
I mean it’s not like your credit score immediately gets affected for something like jaywalking though.
I’m not sure that’s entirely the bar we should be aiming for
It can even impact being hired for jobs. Low credit score? You might be untrustworthy or motivated to steal
Well if it’s the free market abusing us it’s okay. That’s just freedom.
US credit score won’t get you sent to jail or a re-education camp, at least. At least, not yet.
It will condem you to poverty tho, which may be even worse than jail
It can impact everything in your life, even jobs and housing now. It’s practically the same thing except instead of being forced to live in a camp you’re living on the street.
And if you dare get together with other people that are forced onto the street and make a camp together somewhere isolated, the government tears it down and evicts you and destroys your things. Thank god for our freedom.
I don’t have a credit score, and have never had a problem renting. It’s getting a mortgage that I can’t do without a partner who’s been consistently paying off a credit card for decades.
My credit score wasn’t good enough, so I had to show the last place I rented 6 months of my employers payments to rent
I’ve never missed a payment, nor do I have any debt. I just don’t exist in the system enough to rent
The US version is a system that calculates the risk of loaning money vs being paid back. In order to be approved for a loan the credit score is used to evaluate whether or not it is likely to be paid back within the terms of the loan. As a result those with bad credit have trouble getting favorable terms for cars, housing and basically anything that can’t be purchased outright. Does it negatively affect people for things outside of their control and perpetuate cycles of poverty? Absolutely, but it is based in actual fiscal risk to calculate sustainable loan practices.
China on the other hand took the US term of “credit” and abused the everloving shit out of it to punish people that the government dislikes. Did your cousin post a Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh meme? Well too bad that you were shopping for a house, because your “credit” is no longer high enough to not be homeless. You should have thought of that before you were related to someone who disagreed with the government!
Not being able to demonstrate to a bank that you are financially reliable enough to pay back a loan is unfortunate, but a rational reason for an unfavorable interest rate or denial of a loan. Making people ineligible for even renting an apartment that is within their financial means because the dictator in charge dislikes you is a completely different thing altogether.
Not really. It just keeps track of how often you miss your credit card payments so creditors will know how high of a risk you are to lend money to. If affects if you can get loans and what interest rates you can get on loans. But if you just pay your loans/credit card bills, you’ll be fine.
yes, but in the classically American fashion we only care about money so much only the money stuff even goes into calculating it
Well yeah, because it’s only used when talking about loaning money…
It’s similar but only take into account financial and professional information. As I understand it, the Chinese version also covers your daily activities.
Would a hospital ever refuse you care if you have outstanding bills or hospital bills with collections?
Depends on the severity of the issue.
For a life threatening emergency, no
For like pain relief, yes
The hospital must stabilize you and save your life from immediate danger. They don’t have to make you better or solve the problem.
It’s illegal in the Emergency Room. Anywhere else they can. Poor people end up relying on Emergency care, ignoring bills, and the hospitals write it off as “charity care,” which helps them justify their non-profit status, when they’re non-profits
Question to Americans, is it a secret way to make poor people not have children?
No I think it’s the opposite. They expect people to get pregnant and have kids (though with abortion and birth control that is happening less- hence targeting those recently). This is designed to make sure they stay poor so that the wage slave class stays well populated.
Actually it’s easier to pay hospital bills when you’re poor. You either go to a non-profit hospital and ask for charity, where they’ll wipe your bill clean if you make too little, or you just don’t pay the bill. What’s bankruptcy if you’re too poor to have credit anyways?
You have never been poor have you? I can guarantee you that it is not that easy.
Having assets and credit are too very different things. And forcing some one in to poor credit can affect them for decades. Making it difficult or impossible to do simple things like have a bank or finding a place to rent. That is why it is called a cycle of poverty. Once you get the label of poor. It can be very hard to remove that label even if you are hardworking and have a stable job. Live become more expensive making it even harder to get out of poverty.
Plus if you think bankruptcy is an easy or quick process. I hope you never have to go through it.
I have been poor if you consider making 15k a year for five years and having to live with three other people to make ends meet poor. Also, I was being somewhat facetious.
what about a midde class person? someone that makes enough to be able to pay 20k, but meaning that would be their savings
The actual middle class generally has a job that gives health insurance which will pay for it almost entirely. If you don’t, you’re probably not middle class unfortunately
You’re describing what people used to think “middle class” meant. These days, we all know that health insurance doesn’t cover nearly as much as you want it to. Costs have skyrocketed in the last few years, let alone decades.
While it’s a fact that the middle class is shrinking, I think you’re miscalibrated.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4631736
No. The rich want poor people to crack out kids to fill up the military and create downward salary pressure on the working class.
Not to mention, being poor usually means poorly educated which means easily manipulated by the corporate media.
Shhh you aren’t supposed to let people in on the plan. Just think what would happen if they learned to read and saw this.
I assume you’re downvoted by someone who’s oblivious to the concept of sarcasm.
But I’ll add that even if they read this, we can always ban abortions so their whole life is fucked and they become good and obedient -slaves- workers
That’s a steady supply of cannon fodder for a couple decades.
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If it is, it’s a bad one lol. Poor people tend to have more kids, just in general, and that doesn’t change in the states.
Ah… In short… Insurance covers a portion of it and whatever insurance doesn’t pay, I just… Simply don’t pay it. It goes to collections and they spam call me and I don’t answer my phone. Suddenly they give up and after 7 years, it’s gone. Is it right? I don’t know. I definitely haven’t devoted half of my paycheck to medical bills though.
Does that bork your credit?
Yes it does
That seems like an unfair and inescapable conundrum.
“Should’ve thought of that before you had kids while poor” -Republicans
“if you thought about it though and decided not to, too bad, we’ve decided for you that you must go through with it”
-Also Republicans
“And this is our plan to have a steady supply of impoverished, under educated people to make into wage slaves, military killbots, and to bolster the for-profit prison system!”
Once I got some physical therapy bills sent to collections. It wasn’t because I failed to pay. The practice was really shitty about billing and record keeping and never billed me for a bunch of visits. They went under and sent their records over to collections.
The collectors called me and pretty much opened with “this place went out of business. We would settle for pretty much anything. How about 10% of what you owe?”
They get a percentage of everything they collect so you might think they’d go for the full amount. But I think the game is sometimes just “what can we get easily and quickly.”
Mine were born at home with a midwife who did sliding scale pricing (charged based on your income). Only available to low risk women who lived close to the hospital though.
If you are quite poor, Medicaid will cover pregnancy and hospital birth expenses, even if you don’t otherwise qualify. I know someone who did that and said the nurse yelled at her because she wasn’t married.
Was poor, had a baby at 20. $6,000 hospital bill we paid in monthly installments of like $100
Paid off my kid being born when she was like 6 or 7 lol. Kind of like a car
Debt. Massive amounts of debt.
American hospitals cannot legally refuse to treat you even if they know you can’t pay/don’t have insurance. So worst case scenario is you go and have whatever done and they bill you and you don’t pay and it’s a write off for the hospital.
Often times, if you can’t pay they will offer a reduced amount to at least get something out of you if they know they won’t get anything otherwise.
Fucking crooks
Edit: who the fuck is downvoting me? USA hosptials owners?
It’s very expensive to be poor.
People are thinking you mean the poor people, not the hospitals.
I’m just laughing at the absurdity of someone calling poor people who can’t afford their medical bills “fucking crooks” but that actually is a position I wouldn’t surprised to see these days.
Not just these days. See Reagan and his lies about ‘welfare queens’ living on lobster and buying Cadillacs off of government money.
Unfortunately, yeah, it’s very common in the south, so I’m used to seeing it :(
Even in the more ‘blue’ cities down here, it’s usually safer to assume that whoever you’re talking to is a republican piece of shit, or else has holdover ideas (like ‘the poor don’t deserve handouts’) from being raised that way.
