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"As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers genera

by downut 3y ago

"As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket." I've had several chronic issues, including cancer surgery and the followon therapies, that I in no way wanted, that stretched out years, ensuring that we (the family) spent our ~$10K deductible for several years running. I've seen this with quite a few other people, as well. It is certain that we would have been bankrupted w/o middling quality corp health insurance. We have also had many $1000s in dental bills, in a year, quite a few times. The idea that you could self finance these yearly cash flow (up to, what, $100K?) is absurd, unless you are really rich, but you seem to be somewhat price sensitive, so I dunno. OTOH my sister-in-law makes > $500K/y as an anesthesiologist, and her spouse is a pathologist sadly making somewhat less, so on average the family must be doing great! Yeah no, my Euro-fruends are aghast at the medical situation here in the US, and we all do view it as a massive effective tax on the unlucky that Europeans more or less don't have to worry about.

cryptonector 3y ago
All of this is due to a) ACA, b) the whole HMO craze in the 90s, and c) long before that, ERISA, oh and also: lack of pricing transparency, and lack of incentives to users to check pricing, and so on and on. We don't have a free market in health care unless you have no coverage, then you can actually negotiate prices. What we have is a monster, and the monster we have today is way way worse than the monster we had in the early 90s. Not that it helps to say these things. Most of you are either a) bigtech employees with nice healthcare plans and maybe don't care that much (until you're no longer bigtech), or b) fintech employees (same), or c) too young to remember what 80%/20% plans were like back in the day (or never had a non-$WORK plan) and therefore all too willing to demand and/or accept any purported solution that isn't. I hope it helps to say these things here. Meanwhile we've had a lot of factors pushing up inflation in medical services, so when you add it all up it sucks, but it sucks for all sorts of artificial reasons.

by downut 3y ago

cryptonector 3y ago

All of this is due to a) ACA, b) the whole HMO craze in the 90s, and c) long before that, ERISA, oh and also: lack of pricing transparency, and lack of incentives to users to check pricing, and so on and on. We don't have a free market in health care unless you have no coverage, then you can actually negotiate prices. What we have is a monster, and the monster we have today is way way worse than the monster we had in the early 90s. Not that it helps to say these things. Most of you are either a) bigtech employees with nice healthcare plans and maybe don't care that much (until you're no longer bigtech), or b) fintech employees (same), or c) too young to remember what 80%/20% plans were like back in the day (or never had a non-$WORK plan) and therefore all too willing to demand and/or accept any purported solution that isn't. I hope it helps to say these things here. Meanwhile we've had a lot of factors pushing up inflation in medical services, so when you add it all up it sucks, but it sucks for all sorts of artificial reasons.