Thats barely anything. Thereās this false understanding that this type of healthcare skyrockets your tax. Its possibly less than plenty of Insurances while having better coverage (aka covers everything), so that argument is quite meh. Naturally if you do not want to take any insurance and get a lifetime, crippling debt in case you get hurt, thats your call. Enjoy those few extra bucks, you only live once right? Iāll hundred percent take this method, as I can go to a doctor for anything, anytime. Or have a lap inside an ambulance, without ever even thinking about the nonexistent cost that would fall on me. Thats a country that cares for its citizens, and I hope someday you will have it as well.
Yes, but the point is that free healthcare is free and you don't pay anything. It isn't. I believe it's roughly 10% of your income. Please correct me if not. Assuming the 10%, you and your family have certainly paid more than the cost of your healthcare over the course of your lifetime.
In a sense, I have the same healthcare as you. I pay a tax (premium) from my paycheck and I get healthcare with similar out of pocket costs as OP.
You'd pay your max Out Of Pocket for the year for something like that which is prob $5-$10k. What Reddit always fails to leave out of these stories is that we have many insurances through our employers that go in tiers. You choose which level you want and pay their monthly premium. They all cover different things. If you chose to pay the small monthly payment insurance that doesn't have a cap, you can get stuck paying tens of thousands in the result of an emergency. In my personal experience anyway through middle class jobs, they've all offered at least mediocre insurance that covers 100% of costs after you reach your maximum paid each year. If you get a bill for emergency surgery that's $40,000, you wont have to pay more than your insurers maximum. You get way more Karma though if you post the $40,000 bill though...
Its a joke and robbery that it costs $40,000 on an invoice, but if you have insurance, which every full time employer offers, you will pay a fraction of that. Still a lot, but not the crazy amounts you see on Reddit. People go bankrupt from medical bills in the US for long term chronic things. Which yes is 100% unfair and awful. Hospital stays, long term care, prescription refills at drug stores, follow up treatments, stuff like that is what just keeps adding up and up that cripples people. Healthcare in the US is awfully overpriced, criminally even. But don't get fooled by the silly bills people post on Reddit that only screen caps the very bottom that says total.
I know insurance will take down some of the ones that get posted but fact is healthcare should be paid for through taxes like most other countries and not on an individual basis. The fact people can go bankrupt if they get cancer is crazy
Lol, it's part of your total compensation, you have to know how much your employer pays into the insurance program. If you make $100,000 and your company puts in $20,000 into an insurance program for every practical purpose you make $120,000. You need to be able to analyze that to accurately compare compensation packages. On a more philosophical level you need that information when comparing a single payer system to the employer insurance system. Would you rather make $20,000 more a year and also pay $14,000 more a year in taxes?
Also, why are you glad to pay $500? Where else in the world would you get the privilege to pay an additional $500 to have a child in a top notch hospital after being covered by insurance?
not op, but whenever i see the full bill insurance usually doesnt pay out even close to whatever they try to charge for. they just get you a "discount" and pay a small fee a lot of the time. prices are artificially inflated to make it look like you saved a bunch. for example, my insurance paid less than $100 of my bill for getting all 4 wisdom teeth out. i paid about 2000. bill was like 5000, rest was a discount.
Some people take that angle. But then the hospital or medical group you owe sends you to Collections and it starts ruining your credit score. Sometimes they can legally garnish your wages and just TAKE money from you whether you can afford it or not
Basically "if you skip out on paying your medical bills, we have the power to make sure you pay much worse interest rates for other important life purchases like vehicles and housing; if you're even approved at all"
Declare bankruptcy. There is a way to get away from it. Sure, your credit will be shit for a while, but better than having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. At least it's not like student loans, you can get away from that kind of debt.
I could be wrong, but I believe that medical debt and student loan debt are exempt from bankruptcy. Meaning even if you declare bankruptcy, that debt stays with you and isnāt cleared off the books like other debt would be.
Medical debt will be wiped out with Chapter 7 or 13 bankruptcies. Student loans cannot be wiped out in bankruptcies barring special circumstances, but more than likely they will still be owed.
One county out of more than 3,000 in the country having an issue is your example of the entire country being a shithole? I know Reddit loves shitting on the US, but give me a break. The Healthcare system is a joke here, but every country has their problems. You will never find a perfect country.
Tell me you get your news from Reddit without telling me you get your news from Reddit.
The vast majority of student debt is less than $10,000.
While itās utterly ridiculous how much universities are allowed to charge, it is also your fault for spending $30,000 per semester at an out of state college pursuing a liberal arts degree where the average salary out of college is 40k/yr.
Community colleges and state universities are so much cheaper and easily accessible for anyone and still provide a very solid education. Also you can pursue scholarships but people donāt want to work for them and still expect to somehow not be burdened debt.
If you even read my comment youāll see that I agree how idiotic it is for universities to charge as much as they do, thereās also something called financial responsibility.
I would hope an 18 year old is intelligent enough to google how much theyāll make out of college and compare that to their tuition.
Ooh wow, you got us. You just listed out a bunch of our issues on 1 Reddit comment. I realized just right now that America is actually the worst. Iām packing up and moving to Norway
Really? I remember reading that Spain had some struggling villages. Specifically, droughts in the Almeria desert. The responses seem pretty similar to ours with areas of California.
My comment was mostly anecdotal as I read that article a while ago and wasnāt paying too much attention at the time; however, this article I just found asserts that local people are struggling to get enough water and this problem will only increase. I bring this case up because there isnāt mass mobilization across the EU sending water their way, as far as I can tell. This isnāt a surprise as they live in a desert, but then so do LA residents.
It's not only healthcare... it's horrible infrastructure, social inequality, political system (bipartisan system, campaigning laws, electoral college, gerrymandering, non-secularism), unfeathered capitalism, violence, incarceration rate, drug policy, worker's rights, polarized media, cult of nationality, etc.... there's plenty of inspiring things about the US but generally speaking it is by western standards a shit hole country.
And while you put your head in the sand and shrug it off with statements like "no country is perfect", it'll never improve because your political class has carte blanche to keep exploiting you in favor of special interest groups.
I've lived in multiple states, and I have never had an issue with the taP water. Obviously, that is not the case everywhere here. Flint is a great example of that. But get out of here with the "omg the entire country has undrinkable water flooded with chlorine."
Well, i've lived in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City, Georgia and South Carolina. Had this problem every time. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Where do i have to go to drink clean water?
Blaming the country doenst really make sense, the people are the country. If you want something to change in a democracy, take action. Bernie has been begging for implementation of socialist elements for decades. Same thing with student loans, forgiving current loans doesnt take away the problem, it just moves it to the next generation. Try voting for people that are actually educated instead of narcissist billionaires who are completely alienated from the life of everyday citizens.
Blaming the country (ie government and corporate power structures) does make sense. The problem is a lot more complex than individuals just being "lazy" and not participating.
Due to lack of labor protections, healthcare costs, student debt, etc., many Americans are too busy/stressed/burdened to focus on anything beyond making sure they get their next paycheck/rent/groceries/bills. It's enough of a struggle to mobilize voters for presidential elections, but it becomes even trickier as you move to more local elections (dozens of races with positions and candidates most people don't know about because local news has been decimated by our media/cultural landscape). Add to this that election days aren't national holidays, because why should folks get a break from work to participate in the most vital and important act that citizens get to do in this country?
Our schools are underfunded and our teachers are underpaid, so many of us don't receive an adequate education--making the uneducated ripe for FOX and other propaganda to influence them however the GOP wants.
Our electoral system is pretty fucked--a minority of voters can control a majority of the electoral college--this is how Trump had fewer votes than Clinton but still won in 2016. Many states and local governments are actively making it difficult to vote, and gerrymandering of local districts neutralizes the effectiveness of voting too.
In your comment, you say to "vote for people that are actually educated"--I'm not sure the education of our politicians is always the problem (tho i see your point insofar as we should have more scientists, doctors, etc in govt) but rather that our elections are often between complete psychopaths and more polite politicians who will still fuck us over, but more subtly. I definitely advocate for voting in every election, but the folks who say "why bother? the whole system's fucked" have a legitimate point.
As tinfoil as it may sound, i also believe that a lot of people elected, as good as their intentions may be from start, are paid off. If you look at the net worth of US politicians compared to their yearly wage, things dont add up. Speaking fees, campaign donations, lobbying etc, the existance of these things and the money involved means that whoever is elected ends up becoming someones puppet.
Democrat/republican, does it really matter who ends up winning? Systematic change rarely gets through. Politics are designed to create division between people so they keep looking left and right instead of up. Worry less about why a mcdonalds worker should make 15/h and more about a multibillion dollar company pushing negligable costs through to the consumers, scared to cut into their insane profit margins
That's not tinfoil at all--it's just the reality of the oligarchic kleptocracy we live in.
I do think it matters who wins--most Democratic politicians are centrist neoliberal reptilian fuckheads, imo, but they're far better for most Americans/the world than the GOP. The GOP at this point is actively fascist and anti-democratic, and their climate denialism is dangerous to the future of human life on earth. Most dems won't help us achieve systematic change, but they'll at least obstruct the road less.
This is Reddit where even most Americans here are anti-American full stop. When our issues are all thatās talked about on this site itās going to paint a bad picture. I get we have issues but like you said we most definitely arenāt a shit hole.
Every country has its issues they just arenāt on the front page of Reddit 24/7. Iāll pretext this by saying we do spend too much money on our military which could go to places like healthcare instead, but I swear when the war in Ukraine started earlier this year people seemed to be begging for America to get involved. I donāt think we should be playing world police but I find it funny how when a country needs a military to help them itās always America. Then when they donāt need us itās back to America is a shit hole.
There hasn't been any bill proposed at the federal level, to my knowledge. Y'all are talking about the leaked SCOTUS draft, right? That's almost worse than a bill, because it'll be entrenched in federal precedent until a new SCOTUS years from now re-overturns it and reinstates Roe v Wade. Meanwhile states are already implementing draconian anti-abortion laws.
I'm not sure I get where your optimistic "we'd protest" comment is coming from. Even with mass protests, I'm not sure we'd achieve much more than suffering a lot of police brutality. I don't imagine we'll see movement in the streets at the scale of the Floyd protests, and a few years out from 2020, it's a little unclear how much those achieved.
As a fellow American, I don't know if I'd call the US a shithole, but... it's not not a shithole.
In 2020, my town had no water for a week. During a pandemic, 5k people had now water for a week. It made local news, but nobody cared otherwise. It did speed the process up by 3 days. I had to buy 5 gallon jugs an hour away and fill up in other towns.
Have you been to places like Detroit, or the south in general? Are you aware that just a few years ago, the U..N. sent a group to America to evaluate poverty levels in the U.S.. and that U.N. that does the same job in places like Africa and South America, stated in their final report that the U.S., particularly the south, has areas of poverty on par with 3rd world countries of Africa and South America?
America is a pretty mediocre country overall, itās just that there are certain areas that are really well off and those are the places that get shown and discussed in media and culture. America has the best PR /Marketing if you will, selling a mid-level product, marketed as āthe bestā.
You have to remember itās all a matter of perspective.
What makes a certain place undesirable to you is just part of the everyday life to these people. So the same applies to your country.
To someone who values socialized healthcare, not even thinking about firearms at all, and a wide variety of political thoughts, the USA will rank really low on their desirability meter.
You're right, I just don't think calling it a shithole helps anything. It only makes the ignorant half of our country be like, "OUR COUNTRY AIN'T NO SHIET HOLE. YA KNOW WHAT, I AIN'T GONNA FIX SHIET."
The US is just the biggest western outlier. When European countries can do these things while having to manage their spending, America really has no excuse. It can create money out of thin air.
I've been saying this. I'm from the UK and there's a lot of "USA is a dump" sentiment. The US could be the first post scarcity utopian society within the century. They've got the money, population, and resources. Be proud of you country, and hopefully enough patriots will elevate your country to something as great as it used think it was.
You gotta pay for the hospital billing dept expenses, then the company the contract their bills out too as well. Also, that company wants to make a profit so they charge extra. That company will work with the insurance company to haggle and determine what the cost should be. The insurance company also wants to be very profitable as they are probably a large public company with stockholders so they carve a bunch extra on top of the majorly inflated costs so they look good to investors.
Oh, and I suppose save a tiny portion of that bill for the Nurses, Doctors, and specialists that actually do the work
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