At the risk of spiking my blood pressure I will write a few words on this topic. I will start by saying this: The whole system is fucked. I am referring to t

At the risk of spiking my blood pressure I will write a few words on this topic. I will start by saying this: The whole system is fucked. I am referring to the system that facilitates American residents getting healthy and staying that way. What is the basis of my claims? I admit that I am a healthy 33 year old white male and I probably have only seen that tip of the iceberg. I am also a father of 3. My oldest daughter was born with a chronic health problem, diagnosed at 19 weeks gestation. Since her birth, a little over 7 years ago, we have received a bill from the hospital that provided her care at least once per week. This continues today, despite not having had any services provided in almost a year. If I paid all of these bills, bankruptcy would be my only recourse. I try to communicate with my insurance provider (employer provided), to determine what's legitimate, and what should be covered. In the end, I'm mostly left to my own devices to pay for the services that I think I received. Every year we pay the deductible, and every year we get billed for significantly more. As another example, not along ago, my third daughter was born. Due to the complications of my wife's first pregnancy we received care from two different OBGYN facilities, one local to us, and one at the delivering hospital. Though the local facility was only responsible for less than 10 checkups, they claimed that we still owed our entire deductible to them, prior to delivery. We paid half. A week prior (this much is hilarious in itself) to delivery by a doctor from the other facility, we received a bill for the full deductible amount, due to them also. When the delivery actually happened, it took less than 2 hours, and we stayed one night. We also had 3 checkups at this other facility. Our bill of course is the same as everybody else's, regardless of whether they had a C-Section and stayed for 5 nights, or had 30 hours of labor. I could actually be OK with this (I'm onboard for socialized healthcare), if they could get the billing part right. Again: * I am constantly billed directly by healthcare providers over and above what my insurance policy says I should pay. * I pay almost 25% of my yearly earnings in insurance premiums. * I end up deciding what I will pay and what I will not pay. I admit that this is probably not the best situation for anyone. The whole system is fucked.