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My genuinely overkill for my needs private health insurance as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone...

My genuinely overkill for my needs private health insurance as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone... costs less than half your pre-obamacare insurance, factoring in the exchange rate. I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. While not as nearly unanimous as the metric system, well funded Public Health Care to a level where most people don't need health insurance to cover an emergency hospital visit for say a broken leg... is basically what everyone else around the world in other countries considers a normal and good thing... In essence... You were already getting ripped off, now you're getting ripped off even more. In England, Australia, Germany, France, Canada, etc, etc, etc... The treatment for your child would likely have cost you nothing, or nearly nothing. The fact it cost you over $10,000 is not entirely the Obama's fault, it's the collective fault of nearly a century of American citizens who have accepted the status quo and not pressed for any sort of change prior to Obama promising to change it single handedly, since that worked about as well as most people watching from other developed countries with modern socially supported public health care expected it to... it was a best case train wreck because of health care industry self interested lobbying efforts from pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, hospital management companies, all the companies... not because it was a bad idea to stop the fright train that is employer provided health care in the USA. They just managed to convince them to stop the metaphorical train in such a way they could profit even more, and thus cost everyone including the government even more money...

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>thus cost everyone including the government even more money... Americans were simply going without healthcare, so it was unavoidable that it was going to cost the whole country more money. >I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. Because once the government gives a subsidy to a certain tribe, that tribe no longer has an incentive to vote to increase that subsidy to members of other tribes. For example, in the US, old people have had healthcare for many decades. And they have the highest voting rates. But as a politician, you are not going to get far advertising that you will increase their taxes so that non old people can receive healthcare, especially if many of those non old people do not look like the old people. But, completely screwing people is also politically unpopular, so what can pass is a half measure, like Medicaid, where politicians can say they helped people get healthcare, but also keep taxes low. How? Well, you simply pay the doctors and drug makers and dentists less for people covered by Medicaid. And you pay more for people covered by Medicare. And as the tribes get more and more politically influential, you can keep adding various tiers of subsidy recipients. And that is the beauty of “health insurance companies”, or rather, “managed care organizations”. Businesses with young, healthy, office workers can pool their health risks into less risky pools and pay much higher reimbursements so they get premium healthcare. Poor people get directed to Medicaid, which will have a network of fewer and overburden doctors so they get less care, and less quality care. Medicare will provide old people with enough healthcare to keep their votes coming. Federal and military employees get decent healthcare because their coverage pays more. Others get dumped onto the statewide exchanges that are you get what you pay for type deals. And all of this is funneled through the managed care organizations so that people cannot easily measure who is getting what and who is getting more from the system versus less. So tl:dr is that as a country, we do not actually want to help everyone equally. Just enough to say they were helped, but at the same time, make sure we get as much of the pie for ourselves as possible, and give up as little as possible.
robomartin 4y ago
> as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone... costs less than half your pre-obamacare insurance > I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. Agree with everything in your comment. I think I can say everyone in the US wants a solution for this, including the idea of healthcare not being financially crippling for anyone. It is easy to wrongly reduce any issue to a single variable. Politicians love doing this because they can then identify good and bad and use that to divide the population for votes. The truth is that everything in life is a complex multivariate problem. Few take the time to take a deep dive into the tree of variables in order to understand. While not a comprehensive explanation, I'll attempt to at least provide some perspective, particularly for those not living in the US and likely, because of that, not having direct visibility into the web of issues. From my perspective, there are four macro issues that drive our cost structures. I'll keep it short. Happy to expand on any of these if interested. 1: Education: K-12 2: Education: University 3: Student loans 4: Laws, lawyers, lawsuits, liability Like I said, there are many variables beyond these. Primary and Secondary Education We send our kids to school from 5 to 17/18 years of age. After twelve years of schooling young adults come out of these institutions with no marketable skills whatsoever. Our high school graduates are only good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. They are ignorant and pretty much useless without an additional 6 to 24 months of training. They are sold the idea that minimum wage should be a living wage because we are training people who can only qualify for minimum wage jobs. Except that faulty economic ideologies is constantly eroding living standards at every level. Politicians pushed the $15/hr minimum wage as a solution for all the problems. Today, with inflation and rising cost structures (some of it driven by the doubling of the minimum wage), earning $15 per hour is likely less --in terms of purchasing power-- than it was before selling people that fantasy. Education is at the core of a number of problems in this country. How does that affect healthcare? You are creating generations of poor people with no or low skills. This means they have trouble financially contributing to the greater good. University Education If I remember correctly, the university drop-out rate is such that only about 25% (if not less) of first year students in the US graduate. This is connected to the prior issue as well as other factors. Once again, we end-up with a massive number of people who will likely suffer from financial struggles for life. The fact that K-12 schools do not prepare students well means a significant number of them have to either take (and pay for) remedial coursework or eventually drop out. Most drop out. In addition to this, our university programs waste student time by forcing them to take irrelevant coursework. This is particularly visible in the STEM fields. Students have to engage in about a years' worth of irrelevant non-STEM coursework. I define "irrelevant" to mean: Coursework that no employer cares about at all and will have no effect in advancing anyone professionally. We could graduate people 25% faster and with 25% lower student debt if we just excised irrelevant coursework. What's ironic about this is that anyone would agree that someone pursuing a degree in art would be wasting their time and money if forced to take a year filled with mathematics, physics, chemistry and other STEM topics. And yet, for some strange reason, we force our STEM students to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste an entire year taking courses like "Young Karl Marx". No bullshit, my son was forced to take this course at a major university while pursuing his degree in CS. Forced? Yes. A sociology module was required for graduation. Magically, this was the only available class for something like two quarters. In other words, he would have had to delay his graduation by half a year or "choose" to take this irrelevant and utterly useless class. And pay for it, of course. What does this have to do with healthcare? Hang on, we are getting there. <continued>
JamesBarney 4y ago
People assume because other places have public health insurance and lower health expenses that's why it's expensive in America. But there are plenty of places with private insurance in Europe that are much cheaper than the US. And our public healthcare prices are also much higher than the rest of the world. Our medical establishment is very inefficient, pays for lots of useless shit, and subsidizes the world's medical research. All those things cost money.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

>thus cost everyone including the government even more money... Americans were simply going without healthcare, so it was unavoidable that it was going to cost the whole country more money. >I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. Because once the government gives a subsidy to a certain tribe, that tribe no longer has an incentive to vote to increase that subsidy to members of other tribes. For example, in the US, old people have had healthcare for many decades. And they have the highest voting rates. But as a politician, you are not going to get far advertising that you will increase their taxes so that non old people can receive healthcare, especially if many of those non old people do not look like the old people. But, completely screwing people is also politically unpopular, so what can pass is a half measure, like Medicaid, where politicians can say they helped people get healthcare, but also keep taxes low. How? Well, you simply pay the doctors and drug makers and dentists less for people covered by Medicaid. And you pay more for people covered by Medicare. And as the tribes get more and more politically influential, you can keep adding various tiers of subsidy recipients. And that is the beauty of “health insurance companies”, or rather, “managed care organizations”. Businesses with young, healthy, office workers can pool their health risks into less risky pools and pay much higher reimbursements so they get premium healthcare. Poor people get directed to Medicaid, which will have a network of fewer and overburden doctors so they get less care, and less quality care. Medicare will provide old people with enough healthcare to keep their votes coming. Federal and military employees get decent healthcare because their coverage pays more. Others get dumped onto the statewide exchanges that are you get what you pay for type deals. And all of this is funneled through the managed care organizations so that people cannot easily measure who is getting what and who is getting more from the system versus less. So tl:dr is that as a country, we do not actually want to help everyone equally. Just enough to say they were helped, but at the same time, make sure we get as much of the pie for ourselves as possible, and give up as little as possible.

robomartin 4y ago

> as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone... costs less than half your pre-obamacare insurance > I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. Agree with everything in your comment. I think I can say everyone in the US wants a solution for this, including the idea of healthcare not being financially crippling for anyone. It is easy to wrongly reduce any issue to a single variable. Politicians love doing this because they can then identify good and bad and use that to divide the population for votes. The truth is that everything in life is a complex multivariate problem. Few take the time to take a deep dive into the tree of variables in order to understand. While not a comprehensive explanation, I'll attempt to at least provide some perspective, particularly for those not living in the US and likely, because of that, not having direct visibility into the web of issues. From my perspective, there are four macro issues that drive our cost structures. I'll keep it short. Happy to expand on any of these if interested. 1: Education: K-12 2: Education: University 3: Student loans 4: Laws, lawyers, lawsuits, liability Like I said, there are many variables beyond these. Primary and Secondary Education We send our kids to school from 5 to 17/18 years of age. After twelve years of schooling young adults come out of these institutions with no marketable skills whatsoever. Our high school graduates are only good for stacking boxes and, with training, making coffee. They are ignorant and pretty much useless without an additional 6 to 24 months of training. They are sold the idea that minimum wage should be a living wage because we are training people who can only qualify for minimum wage jobs. Except that faulty economic ideologies is constantly eroding living standards at every level. Politicians pushed the $15/hr minimum wage as a solution for all the problems. Today, with inflation and rising cost structures (some of it driven by the doubling of the minimum wage), earning $15 per hour is likely less --in terms of purchasing power-- than it was before selling people that fantasy. Education is at the core of a number of problems in this country. How does that affect healthcare? You are creating generations of poor people with no or low skills. This means they have trouble financially contributing to the greater good. University Education If I remember correctly, the university drop-out rate is such that only about 25% (if not less) of first year students in the US graduate. This is connected to the prior issue as well as other factors. Once again, we end-up with a massive number of people who will likely suffer from financial struggles for life. The fact that K-12 schools do not prepare students well means a significant number of them have to either take (and pay for) remedial coursework or eventually drop out. Most drop out. In addition to this, our university programs waste student time by forcing them to take irrelevant coursework. This is particularly visible in the STEM fields. Students have to engage in about a years' worth of irrelevant non-STEM coursework. I define "irrelevant" to mean: Coursework that no employer cares about at all and will have no effect in advancing anyone professionally. We could graduate people 25% faster and with 25% lower student debt if we just excised irrelevant coursework. What's ironic about this is that anyone would agree that someone pursuing a degree in art would be wasting their time and money if forced to take a year filled with mathematics, physics, chemistry and other STEM topics. And yet, for some strange reason, we force our STEM students to spend tens of thousands of dollars and waste an entire year taking courses like "Young Karl Marx". No bullshit, my son was forced to take this course at a major university while pursuing his degree in CS. Forced? Yes. A sociology module was required for graduation. Magically, this was the only available class for something like two quarters. In other words, he would have had to delay his graduation by half a year or "choose" to take this irrelevant and utterly useless class. And pay for it, of course. What does this have to do with healthcare? Hang on, we are getting there. <continued>

JamesBarney 4y ago

People assume because other places have public health insurance and lower health expenses that's why it's expensive in America. But there are plenty of places with private insurance in Europe that are much cheaper than the US. And our public healthcare prices are also much higher than the rest of the world. Our medical establishment is very inefficient, pays for lots of useless shit, and subsidizes the world's medical research. All those things cost money.