Medical Insurance in the US
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@antonit said:
So glad to live in Canada where we don't have to deal with the complexities of the healthcare system. Almost everything is taken care of.
It's really hard to overestimate the value of this. It's far more than cost or quality of care, it is also things like the stress and fear of never knowing if things will be covered, if you will have to fight for coverage, if you will get billed falsely (this isn't rare, it's the norm), if you are getting your coverage handled properly, if you have the right coverage, if your coverage is legal (we've tried to get insurance just to find out the provider wasn't a "real" one and didn't count), etc. It's very stressful to worry about and it takes a lot of time. It requires every company to have staff (or outsource staff) to deal with this stuff. Every new hire has to spend a lot of time going over details. It makes normal life tasks like switching jobs unnecessarily complex and stressful and leaves tons of room for error.
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@scottalanmiller When I had cancer I spent hours upon hours fighting with the insurance agency to get my treatment. Then when they finally approved treatment it wasn't the one my Oncologist recommended. It took me weeks to get them to kinda cover what I had to have done. Then when the bills started coming in I then had to spend more hours and days on the phone fighting with the hospital for correct billing. Then with the insurance company to pay their portion of said bill. Then with the hospital again to get the bill correct for the insurance agency. Then get to a Chemo appointment and find out I can't get my treatment because bills haven't been paid. The only thing that saved me in the end is a bad surgeon who missed some of what he was supposed to remove and had a hefty malpractice suit (which of course ended up only being enough to pay my hospital bills).
Now I don't have insurance and so far every dr I have had to see is more than willing to negotiate for cash payment on the spot. Which takes me like 10 minutes to do not hours and days.
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@scottalanmiller Definitely cheaper outside the US. In the US health insurance for me alone was about $350 a month or something along those lines. In Russia full coverage private insurance costs me about $850 USD per family member for the entire year. And no, I'm not waiting in lines or sitting in front of death panels, or anything like that. Americans get screwed over because there's a sizable amount of the population who believes things like "it's expensive because it's so good" (it's not), "there's no such thing as a free lunch" (even if true, that doesn't mean stale bread lunch costs the same as a 5 star restaurant), "anything else is socialism/communism/fascism/cherubism/etc" (lol), etc.
The biggest joke is that Medicare can't even negotiate prices, that right there tells you from top to bottom the whole thing is broken, I don't see a need for discussion otherwise. I feel extremely badly for people who can't afford it. What's even crazier is that often I've tried to tell Europeans I know about how the American healthcare system works, and it usually comes down to:
Them "Well, what if you get cancer and can't afford treatment?"
Me "You die"
Them "I can't believe that."
Me "I hope you never have to find out." -
@tonyshowoff said:
The biggest joke is that Medicare can't even negotiate prices, that right there tells you from top to bottom the whole thing is broken, I don't see a need for discussion otherwise. I feel extremely badly for people who can't afford it. What's even crazier is that often I've tried to tell Europeans I know about how the American healthcare system works, and it usually comes down to:
Well, on the whole Medicare not negotiating prices thing. They don't negotiate anything, ever, they just tell you how much you get for a given procedure. Often times it's not even enough to cover the cost of the supplies used to do any given procedure properly. Now guess how many of the 4 doctors I personally know quit serving Medicare patients.
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One day I'll have coverage, then maybe I can get this bone realigned in my hand, so it doesn't noticeably stick out.
I don't make enough money to get fined at the end of the year, but I would still prefer to be covered.
The ACA has done a lot of good. My girlfriend's mother wouldn't be alive right now it it wasn't for the ACA. It removed lifetime limits and the preexisting condition clause. My girlfriend's mother reached her lifetime limit on her insurance plan and was no longer covered. She has multiple sclerosis, and had to go a few years without proper treatments. Unfortunately she became confined to a wheelchair before she was able to get covered again. This whole situation is absurd. The current healthcare system is a failure.
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@antonit said:
So glad to live in Canada where we don't have to deal with the complexities of the healthcare system. Almost everything is taken care of.
I can say the same in Spain.
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
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@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
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@iroal said:
@antonit said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.Because they're ignorant of the rest of the world for the most part, and the media is paid a lot of money to act as though there's huge problems in Canada and Europe with national healthcare insurance or similar programs. So the debate really is a debate with both sides of the issue really being set by people who benefit from extremely high health insurance costs on top of health care costs in general.
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@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.I've known plenty of people who had to wait, even when they had the money, to have procedures done. The problem is does wait time really reflect massive costs? Even in the case of things like colonoscopies, wait a month or more, still costs $15k+ for it.
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@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will be no waiting, and of course It's Free
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@iroal said:
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will no waiting, and of course It's Free
I do not know one way or the other.
The only real person I ever heard speak about it was a co-worker who moved from the US to England. They hated the system over there for elective type stuff.
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@iroal said:
@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will be no waiting, and of course It's Free
And that's what I mean when I said above that the dialogue really is trying to make people think that even if you were in a car accident, you'll be waiting forever. The irony is emergency rooms in the US take hours upon hours upon hours.
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@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will no waiting, and of course It's Free
I do not know one way or the other.
The only real person I ever heard speak about it was a co-worker who moved from the US to England. They hated the system over there for elective type stuff.
Each country's system has some sort of weird issue or wait that could probably be fixed, but I don't see this worth the whole fact healthcare costs more than anything else in your life, and if you get cancer, you're out God only knows, ... sometimes $1 million+ for some people. That's how the issue is controlled, though, saying "you don't want to have to wait 3 months to fix that clicking when you eat do you? well, cancer treatment is going to have to bankrupt your entire family."
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@scottalanmiller I don't often look but this is what I based it off of and another via Aviva.
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@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
I don't know what planet you are on, but it is certainly not Earth. No wait times in the US? You are f'n crazy.
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@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will no waiting, and of course It's Free
I do not know one way or the other.
The only real person I ever heard speak about it was a co-worker who moved from the US to England. They hated the system over there for elective type stuff.
A real example.
Last night I feel bad and with Flu, using Internet I get a date with my doctor this morning, doctor told me It was just a cold, She gave me the prescription for the medicaments.
I go to the pharmacy and bought the medicaments with a 80% of discount thanks to the prescription, I spend 2 €.
Of course visit the doctor is free.
I love this system.
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@JaredBusch said:
@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
I don't know what planet you are on, but it is certainly not Earth. No wait times in the US? You are f'n crazy.
Hey, a lot of people just don't have experience with it, until it really impacts their lives, then they realise how messed up it is.
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@iroal said:
@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
Perhaps in minor Surgery, if you have a real problem, like cancer, there will no waiting, and of course It's Free
I do not know one way or the other.
The only real person I ever heard speak about it was a co-worker who moved from the US to England. They hated the system over there for elective type stuff.
A real example.
Last night I feel bad and with Flu, using Internet I get a date with my doctor this morning, doctor told me It was just a cold, She gave me the prescription for the medicaments.
I go to the pharmacy and bought the medicaments with a 80% of discount thanks to the prescription, I spend 2 €.
Of course visit the doctor is free.
I love this system.
A decent amount of Americans would respond one of these, if not all:
- You're lying
- That's socialism, we believe in freedom
- Yes but your taxes must be crazy!
- If that's true why do people come to America for healthcare?
- That's communism, we believe in freedom.
- Healthcare is not a right, it's a privilege (I see this one not that often, but often enough to where it's disturbing)
- Hey, if you can't pay, you deserve to be sick (I guess they forget about children and disabled)
- There's no such thing as free! My taxes! My taxes! (meanwhile they pay far more in health insurance, if they have it at all, than they would've paid in taxes).
I see this stuff all the time.
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@tonyshowoff said:
- Healthcare is not a right, it's a privilege (I see this one not that often, but often enough to where it's disturbing)
- There's no such thing as free! My taxes! My taxes! (meanwhile they pay far more in health insurance, if they have it at all, than they would've paid in taxes).
These are the two I hear most often... that and talk about death panels.
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@JaredBusch said:
@BRRABill said:
@iroal said:
It's difficult to me understand why some people in US don't want a public medical service, really difficult.
I have heard many stories of people having to wait a long time for procedures in other countries.
If you are lucky to have good insurance in the US, there is no waiting.
I don't know what planet you are on, but it is certainly not Earth. No wait times in the US? You are f'n crazy.
I've never experienced "high" wait times in the US, but always some wait (few hours) never very fast and nothing like I see in other countries which seem to always be literally zero wait. I think like a lot of things, many Americans are so used to wait times so long that they no longer sense them and actually feel that taking an hour to get from door to doctor as "immediate" because, you know, there is stuff to do and you need to fill out paperwork or whatever.
Whereas seeing a doctor in Greece, as an example, might literally take more time to walk down the hall than to get in and see the doctor. The different in wait time is so dramatically different that being used to American healthcare you actually feel like you might have missed something. It's so fast and so different, but if I had never experienced a zero wait system, I might feel like taking an hour to see a doctor as "normal" and as quick as it could reasonably be handled.
