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amendment to my original reply: I thought about this more and I think your "problem" is that you are young and healthy and have no kids. You do get kind of scr

amendment to my original reply: I thought about this more and I think your "problem" is that you are young and healthy and have no kids. You do get kind of screwed in that situation since you are basically subsidizing everyone else. But, it has to be like that otherwise health care would be prohibitively expensive for people who actually need it. If you have kids over here, you will pay the exact same price for your health insurance as you do now but it will also cover your children. At that point it will be a great deal for you =)

Vnac 9y ago
Yeah, as I mentioned, the calculation is a bit different when people have kids. And that's great, but for me it's unaffordable and cheaper to fly back to the US whenever I need to go to a doctor or refill prescriptions and keep insurance in the US. And that's absurd. It works pretty well though, but that may become unworkable too with the changes to the US system. By pay double, I mean that I would have to pay the employers half as well. And on top of that, most public insurance companies seem to have a minimum amount of money that they assume freelancers make, which is often above what I actually make. So health insurance would come out to be 1/3 of my income pre-tax a lot of the time. There does seem to be some preventative care for older people, but a lot of the stuff my doctors check at yearly visits in the US (basic exams, blood tests, even getting a free yearly checkup at all) doesn't seem to be covered at all if you are under a certain age. There's a lot of nice things about the US system under Obama that I took for granted. Certainly isn't perfect or better in all situations, but there are some areas where it seems significantly better than the system in Germany. So I'm always surprised when I see Americans talking about how great the German system is and treating it like an ideal. It seems like it's good in some situations, but the US system is better in many situations too. I've heard that care is quite good when people end up in a hospital (and people seem to be kept in the hospital much longer and more easily here than in the US), but from everything I've seen, it can be very hard to get any treatment until it gets that bad. May just be a bad sample set though.

Vnac 9y ago

Yeah, as I mentioned, the calculation is a bit different when people have kids. And that's great, but for me it's unaffordable and cheaper to fly back to the US whenever I need to go to a doctor or refill prescriptions and keep insurance in the US. And that's absurd. It works pretty well though, but that may become unworkable too with the changes to the US system. By pay double, I mean that I would have to pay the employers half as well. And on top of that, most public insurance companies seem to have a minimum amount of money that they assume freelancers make, which is often above what I actually make. So health insurance would come out to be 1/3 of my income pre-tax a lot of the time. There does seem to be some preventative care for older people, but a lot of the stuff my doctors check at yearly visits in the US (basic exams, blood tests, even getting a free yearly checkup at all) doesn't seem to be covered at all if you are under a certain age. There's a lot of nice things about the US system under Obama that I took for granted. Certainly isn't perfect or better in all situations, but there are some areas where it seems significantly better than the system in Germany. So I'm always surprised when I see Americans talking about how great the German system is and treating it like an ideal. It seems like it's good in some situations, but the US system is better in many situations too. I've heard that care is quite good when people end up in a hospital (and people seem to be kept in the hospital much longer and more easily here than in the US), but from everything I've seen, it can be very hard to get any treatment until it gets that bad. May just be a bad sample set though.