You’re paying for a service. How much of your paycheck are they taking anyway? Mine is less than 5%. $70 a week. It’s not a whole lot.
So nearly 300$ a month for…what exactly? To be denied life saving treatment?
Even if you have no insurance, they will not deny you life-saving treatments.
It happens all the time. You’re thinking of emergency life-saving treatment. They won’t let you bleed out on the hospital steps. But insurance denies necessary care for chronically ill people because it’s deemed unnecessary by them.
Not on paper, but they absolutely fucking will in person. They’ll tell you your fine, they’ll tell you the wrong thing, and then they put off your appointments and then your dead.
statistically Americans pay twice as much in insurance and taxes as Europeans pay in just taxes for healthcare
When I hear that I also think of Canada and their massively overwhelmed healthcare system. Just remember. If you’re suffering because you can’t get the care you need you can now just ask to die.
Are you saying that people should die instead of of being treated, when a treatment is possible, just because they cannot afford it?
Because the same chucklefucks that keep pushing to provatise insurance even harder in the US are defunding Canadian health systems so 1. It can’t be used as an argument against privatisation and 2. They can go ‘look at how badly this works, we should provatise Canadian healthcare!’
They create the problem with Canadian healthcare, and then offer a solution that puts half the money in their own pocket.
What about the money your company pays for the healthcare? I only see ~$350 a year deducted from my paycheck to pay for my insurance, but according to my W2, my employer pays another $8,000 per year to the insurance company. You’re paying a lot more for your health insurance than you see on your paychecks.
So many fucking people fight me on this…
The company sees your benefits as part of your total compensation. They factor all of it in when considering your “value.” If they weren’t paying the insurance they’d need to pay you more to maintain a level of competitiveness that they claim the benefits add… Not to mention if everyone working paid a healthcare tax there’s no way in fucking hell it would be $1,200+ a month like it currently is… Not to mention eliminating the need for profits which add to the costs…
I have insurance. I went to urgent care when I was pretty sure I had the flu or COVID or something about a year ago (just slightly before COVID was declared “over.”) I paid my copay for doctors office visit, I was in there for about an hour, with roughly 40 minutes of that sitting in a room waiting for a doctor (in an empty clinic) and then had a flu test and a COVID test.
They still sent me to collections for $350 for this visit. I pay a stupid amount for insurance, which my employer subsidizes, and I still can’t even get a fucking flu/COVID test apparently.
For profit health insurance in America is evil. It is easily one of the most fucked up things about this country that we just absolutely ignore.
Nope… Only providers for screwing up basic billing to my insurance.
Every damn provider I seem to have in my area can’t fucking code and bill the correct insurance no matter how much hand holding you do for them. Or worse, they wait 6-10 months before they even send the bill and of course insurance doesn’t want to go back that far. Then they try to bill me.
TL;DR… No it’s always a fight with the doctors office, never the insurance for me.
This is part of the system, and spoilers, it’s still the fault of for-profit insurance. Why do doctors offices screw up? Because every insurance provider negotiates a different rate, what is covered, etc. This office is going to bill one provider $3,000 for an MRI, another provider $27, another one $2799, and another one nothing. And if you go an office over, it’s going to be a whole different set of numbers. And then repeat that for basically every procedure, visit type, etc.
This is a decent part of the reason why Americans pay more than just about any other country for healthcare. We spend billions more per year on exclusively middle-men who are just there in the way of your doctor’s providing you care you need.
Paying for a service that most of the rest of the world decided should already be covered.
It’s getting paid from somewhere, by someone. Doctors aren’t just suddenly free because they have universal healthcare.
I didn’t say they would be. But to pretend American healthcare makes sense is beyond absurd. Workers are already taxed to fund Medicare/-aid (which we can’t access), then we’re also expected to pay private insurance premiums. The best part is that’s de minimis! All that gets you is a pass to get in the door.
Then you have to pay co-pays and coinsurance, and possibly your deductible. We pay SIGNIFICANTLY more than our peers in the wider world for no reason other than greed.
You do realized you still pay for your healthcare via taxes in those nations right?
I guess I pay a similar amount as you; around £230 a month in National Insurance. According to XE that’s about $280.
And yeah, that’s not a bad amount to cover any medical needs I might have.
The difference is that, by and large, that’s all I pay. If I got hit by a car tomorrow, I wouldn’t get charged a penny for the paramedic, for the equipment they use to help me, for the ambulance to take me to hospital, for the doctors and nurses who patch me up, and for all the physio, medications and aftercare I’ll need.
I’ll pay ~£10 per prescription, but if I develop a chronic, life threatening condition, that fee will be waived. If I don’t, then I can pay a flat annual fee of £110 and receive as many prescriptions as I need.
Also, my National Insurance contributions (theoretically) ensure that when I reach retirement age I’ll be able to receive a state pension.
The NHS is something that I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep, and you guys in the US should be fighting for your own version of it.
