> Now, my sister is currently struggling with a serious issue, and as a Medicare patient (being under the poverty level), she wasn't able to be seen for months,

> Now, my sister is currently struggling with a serious issue, and as a Medicare patient (being under the poverty level), she wasn't able to be seen for months, and even now they are unable to diagnose properly due to delays in getting her referrals or tests (CT scans, etc). This sucks, and I’m genuinely really sorry that you and your sister are having to go through this. I hope she gets the care she needs soon and that the delays don’t cause any irreparable harm. Unfortunately, the current issues with access probably have more to do with the way the pandemic has crushed the health care system than with whatever insurance your sister is using. My experience has been that getting access to services right now is much harder than it was in 2019. I’ve had referrals take 3 weeks just to get a scheduler on the phone (plus 1–4 month wait times), physicians wasting their time chasing people up and doing their own scheduling because their support staff no longer exist or aren’t doing their jobs, labs that don’t return phone messages. I even had a clinic outright ghost me last year. It’s an absolute shitshow out there right now. (Also, pedantically: Medicare and Medicaid are two confusingly similarly named but distinct things. Medicare is federally managed for old and disabled people; Medicaid is state managed federally assisted for low income people. You can be on both Medicare and Medicaid at the same time because Medicaid will pay costs that Medicare doesn’t, but they aren’t the same thing.) > I feel the only way to survive long-term is to have a career that enables access to jobs (or unions) that offer health care as a benefit. Without it, paying for family-level premiums is similar to a mortgage. I’m not sure even this is a long-term solution. A friend of mine who works for a very large financial institution as a software architect has had their premiums increase by 200%, OOP by 300%, and deductible by 400% over the past three or four years. They had to figure out how to absorb almost $10000 in new health care costs this year after the company eliminated everything except for some high-premium high-deductible plans.