Wait until you see how much the monthly cost is for a family these days if you’re going through the exchange.
The other fun game is tech doesn’t offer it anymore. I’m in the job hunt and 7 of 10 jobs make you go out of pocket, the next two give you and obscene monthly responsibility so they can say they offer it, and the 10th job has 5000 applicants.
It’s not sustainable.
I’ve never wanted to be American. But I’m glad I’m not American. I live in a totally shit country with a crap corrupt government, but everyday I am thankful, because, at least I don’t live in the US. Sadly I don’t live in the “best country in the world”.
Former soviet republic?
“Who’s the shit-hole country now?”
Hey buddy, USA citizen here, our government is crap and corrupt too.
I don’t think it’s anything near Russia.
Well, you can argue that oligarchs in power are not corrup because they just have conflict of interests, but this is not huge difference
I think the gap between our level of corruption and Russian political corruption is getting smaller every year.
Yeah I don’t want a gate keep. We can all have crap governments.
Although in the US it’s not corruption it’s just lobbying.
There’s lobbying and corruption lol, also lobbying is literally just legalized corruption. Lobbying is corruption.
It’s crazy how we call health insurance, insurance. All it does is slightly discount the bill. It doesn’t insure anything.
But it does. If you get cancer, they pay everything after you hit your max out of pocket. So instead of paying $1M or whatever, you pay something like $15k.
Insurance is there to protect you from black swan-type financial ruin, it isn’t intended to reduce costs for routine care.
The real problem is that costs vary depending on how you pay. The Rx should always cost $X and theb insurance shouldn’t care or know which Rx you pick, they should just pay $Y. The problem imo isn’t insurance, but the completely opaque medical pricing system we have.
If pricing is consistent, it’s a lot easier to design assistance programs for those who need it.
Meanwhile former soviet republics: “Insurance for not going over 15k$? It’s not bill insurance. You get healthcare, state gets paying.”
But that’s not insurance, that’s universal healthcare, which is a completely separate thing.
Here it’s called(translated) Mandatory Medical Insurance.
They can call it whatever they like. Government programs rarely reflect their actual structure.
That said, I don’t know much about European healthcare systems, so maybe it is a form of insurance, idk.
Government programs rarely reflect their actual structure.
I know how it works in Russia. For citizens no matter how much you pay you get free healthcare. But, depending on region, it ranges from just therapist, ambulance and few hospitals few hours away somewhere in the middle of Siberia to polyclinic full of specialists and a lot of specialized hospitals in one city in Moscow.
But if you need “Emergency, including emergency specialized, medical care” because of “sickness, accident, trauma, poisining and other cases requireing emergency treatment”, “Such medical treatment is provided by state and municipal healthcare organizations and is free of charge”. Even if you are tourist.
So there is universal part(emergency healthcare) and “insurance” part(peventative healthcare, non-emergency like optometry). “Insurance” is called mandatory because it is basically 5% tax.
Also, it seems in USSA even citizens pay crazy sums for ambulance. While here it is theoretically possible to get fine for falsly calling ambulance, you have to do phonepranking to actually be fined.
I think it’s very similar in rest of ex-sisters.
Yeah, the ambulance thing is super dumb. I wish we had universal emergency healthcare, it would at least remove that point of stress. You really shouldn’t have to pay if paramedics decide you need to go to the hospital.
But I’m not really sold on the rest. The main issue I have is that what insurance you can get is determined by your employer, and if you don’t like it, you lose whatever they would’ve contributed. If people could pick their own insurance, people would probably be happier, and things like a public option become more useful as a check against private insurance.
I’m not convinced universal healthcare is really going to be cheaper or better for most people though, especially in our already messed up healthcare system. We do need to simplify insurance, because care providers are spending more and more dealing with insurance, which increases costs for everyone without providing value. I’m convinced the ACA (Obamacare) made things worse in that respect, so it simultaneously went too far and not far enough.
But whatever, it could be worse. We pay something like 5%/year for medical care (1.5% for Medicare for the elderly, 3% through my employer plan, and a little extra for incidentals; we’re pretty healthy).
The US healthcare system isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as it’s intended to function: as a way to extract the maximum amount of money from the US public.
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I’m sorry, maybe I can’t follow as a European, but what do you reference?
I think they’re just demonstrating the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
S.C.A.M.
Its a con. Its not called that but in reality with all the convoluted rules and payment streams its simply a con. This is the only country on earth that allows this level of corruption.
Yep. It’s designed to squeeze every dime they can out of people til there’s nothing left when they die. “Oh you can’t afford $600 for meds you need to live? Just for you it’s $300 now!” Then when you come back next month and can’t afford $300 it magically goes down again, and so on until you have nothing left and they let you die. They got all your cash though!
Yeah technically hospitals are supposed to treat you even if they know you can’t pay, but in practice hospitals refuse to deal with a lot of things that you otherwise need to make payments for, often times hospital doctors/nurses will just give you cold medicine and send you home if you go in for a lot of things that really should have something done about them, so if you can’t afford healthcare outside of a hospital (say, a prescription medication you really need) you’re kind of fucked.
In places I know of outside of the US, it’s the norm to go to hospitals for basically anything and people literally use ambulances like they’re fucking taxis because it’s basically free. ((Italians))
The American healthcare system doesn’t usually immediately kill you if you can’t pay, but it definitely kills you gradually if you can’t.
you did not save any money for the insurance because that discount is negotiated. they don’t actually pay the $40. They contract with the drug supplier to raise their “full” price and then discount it for the insurance customers so they look like the insurance is providing value.
This. Insurance is incentivised to make everything as expensive as possible.
So it’s more like a tax for not having insurance then.
I would call it more a racket than a tax but thats just semantics.
GoodRx or something like it was used. Welcome to the man in the middle scam that makes people think they’re getting a good deal when in reality, they pay for insurance but insurance makes it so costly to use their insurance that people have to pay for it out of pocket or with an HSA but can’t apply the cost to their annual deductible. This is a win win for insurance companies and patients get screwed. I hate the US healthcare system so much from spending time interacting with it from the perspective of work and personally.
That’s the goal. The insurance company wants your premiums while keeping the out of pocket so high you find another way to pay, so they don’t have to cough up a dime.
I had a similar experience when paying out of pocket when a former employer offered really shitty healthcare. Turned an outrageous price into something minuscule just by them entering in some info on my behalf.
Can’t.
I’ve had literally insane run-ins with the US healthcare system, and have a bad enough health issue that I’ve been absolutely ruined by it: physically, mentally, financially, and socially. I do mean utterly – that was not hyperbole.
I have nothing else to add right now, because I have medically-induced PTSD and can’t even think about anything medical without having a panic attack now.
Just wanted to chime in with how bad it can get, and I know my situation isn’t as bad as it can be. It ruined everything for me and destroyed my family, but I never had to care for a dying child. There are no forbidden depths.
The fact that the US is the only major industrialized nation without some from of a universal healthcare system is supremely fucked up…
I legit think it’s way too late to implement universal healthcare because the entire food industry would have to change also.
Interesting take. I’ve never heard anyone connect the two. How do you mean?
A lot of the food in the US has chemicals that are banned in other countries that have universal healthcare. The food companies spend millions on research and development to make the food literally addicting. Also our portion sizes are insanely huge. When the other countries have to pay for the healthcare of their citizens, they’re going to make damn sure the food is healthier.
I once heard a european say we eat like we have free healthcare. No we don’t. We eat like we have a government with more accountability to monied interests than to our health, a food industry that profits from us being compelled to overeat cheaply produced foods, and a healthcare system that profits from chronic illness and sudden misfortune. Oh yeah, this onion’s got layers, and it’s rotting from the inside-out.
In fact, I think a genuine effort behind universal healthcare would involve the government suddenly caring a lot more about industry in general growing profits by running things as cheap and dirty as they have been and, in a way, passing their costs onto the general population.
Excellent point. I like it.
And hate it because it’s true. Bastards.Honestly, everyone always pretends like America is the best, but were so painfully behind with so many things…
Who does, Hollywood movies? Life isn’t a movie.
The Republicans exist y’know…
Who pretends america is the best? It leads in some metrics. Other countries lead on others. Quality of life is high for most but not all, comparitavely. However, there is more inequality and poorer healthcare. Even healthcare for the wealthy is expensive for little benefit compared to poorer countries.
I really don’t feel like the quality of life is high in the US. How is that measured? Affordable healthcare? Well paid jobs? Affordable healthy produce? Access to public transport? Good infrastructure? Little wealth disparity? Access to education? Can someone tell me which of these the US leads in?
Other Americans mainly…
It leads in some metrics.
Oh, the irony.
The only thing crazier to me than American healthcare is how many of my fellow Canadians keep pushing for us to have this bullshit, too.
It’s not just Canada - there are people in countries with far better Healthcare Systems that the US, including with National Health Services, who want a US style one.
However this isn’t “man on the street” kind of people, these are the kind who think that if Healthcare costs went from 7% of GDP to 14%, they themselves would be able to capture a significant proportion of those extra 7% - so “investors”, financiers and the kind of politicians bought with money from ultra-rich Americans (like the money that Steve Bannon came to Europe with a couple of years ago very overtly to strengthen the far right).
My own country now has an ultra-neoliberal part that popped-up from nowhere some year ago after Steve Gannon brought that money to Europe, with the most glitzy marketing and the most expensive political pamphlets of all parties, and who, in a country with an actual National Health System, were the only party that wanted it fully privatised, though they stopped being open about it when they found out people were overwhelmingly against it. This party’s ideology has zero local ideas or basis and is wholesale imported from the America’s hardest neolibs (think Financiers and Tech Bros) and yet it got itself up to 7% of the vote in about 5 years.
What’s their argument?
That US system is better cause the privileged don’t have to wait…
Most countries have a private option in some capacity.
But they want the poor to help pay for their privilege…
Our Healthcare system isn’t properly funded and managed for our growing population. Covid burst the bulkheads and is used as an excuse to push for private government funded clinics as “more access to healthcare is better”. Why don’t we save some money and just open more public clinics is never on our politicians agenda.
Even if a semi-private healthcare system means the rich get better care, the money generated will improve the free system vs what we have now. So overall everyone gets better care although some people get BETTER better care
Yeah! I’m sure if we give insurance CEOs enough money, the excess will “trickle down” to the rest of us! There are 0 examples of this backfiring spectacularly.
- this is the argument *
This is exactly NOT what will happen.
I’m assuming that was your intention OP, but just in case:
What will happen is private sector clinics/practices/ect will be able to pay more than public, because they can charge whatever they want, so all the talented nurses/doctors ect will vacate the public sector for private, leaving public understaffed and underfunded even more than it is now. Then some shit government will point at the anemic public system they let suffer and say “it doesn’t make sense to keep this thing alive” and take it out back and shoot it. Then we turn into the states.
The rich get better care (which they can already get with a quick plane ticket if they can’t wait) everyone else gets $300 cream.
It’s f-ing ridiculous that anyone believes for profit healthcare would (note I believe they COULD, they just are designed not to) provide better care than a unified public service that wasn’t being slowly chipped away to make room for profiteering.
Exactly, it could work in theory, but that theory relies on our government executing a proper plan, which they repeatedly seem incapable of doing. Anyone who believes it could work at this point is hooked up on hopium (in my opinion)
I don’t see how it could work in theory. Let’s assume you have a public and a private system and somehow the private system magically performs better than the public system. Then people cut support and funding for the public system and all you have is a private system. But now everyone is stuck with it, so at best you have to have a large body of regulators watching over private companies that are trying to flout the rules as much as possible because that’s their profit margin. And this must all unavoidably drive up the price, because of the profit margin and the extra people involved.
And that’s all assuming that you can properly regulate the system, which you clearly can’t, because the more money it has then the more power it has, and healthcare is a massive industry.
It doesn’t even work in theory. The core concept of a two tiered system is unstable. One way or another, one of those two systems will collapse the other.
This is the grifters spreading misinformation so that they can privatize healthcare and make money off of it.
And people fall for it.
I have a medicine that is $1650 with insurance, copay is $60. Or, rung without insurance and the discount card, it’s $0.
Medicine pricing is utterly a scam.
Yeah dude I have dry eyes. A 3-month supply of my eye drops is $2700 out of pocket, but there’s this magical card that makes it zero. WTF.
If you just need to hydrate your eyes, chances are your drops are just salted water
They’re repurposed Borg nanobots in saline solution.
TBH that would absolutely be worth $2700 to me.
My infusions are 10k. It gets cut by half for insurance. The drug company has like 20k in credits set aside per patient. They pay $10 of my $15 copay with that.
It’s ridiculous.
It’s actually a pretty clever scheme by drug companies to foist the cost of medicine development AND supplying uninsured people onto insurance companies (and from there, the cost is passed on to people with insurance). I just don’t understand how it’s legal, or why the insurance companies - who are supposed to have such great collective bargaining power - accept this status quo.
I have noticed that it only seems to happen with very expensive, very recently developed drugs which are not yet part of the insurance companies recommended therapies, and they typically require a prior authorization (special approval based on the doctor stating there is a medical necessity for this, and only this, drug).
It’s actually a pretty clever scheme by drug companies to foist the cost of medicine development AND supplying uninsured people onto insurance companies (and from there, the cost is passed on to people with insurance).
Hey now. You forgot that research for 99% of novel drugs discovered this century was funded in at least equal portions by public grants (paid for via taxes). So, the drug companies are really triple-dipping there.
Exactly this. The only annoying part is that it then doesn’t count toward your deductable and out of pocket maximum. It’s crazy how nominally $1k+ medicines become like $30 when you pay without insurance.
American health insurance is gambling
The involvement of actuaries is a dead giveaway.
All insurance is. So are warranties.
:::The house always wins.:::
