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US healthcare is such a pain -- very high premiums, high deductibles, tons of paperwork, no price transparency. My wife is from mexico, so while her visiting f
by dilap 1y ago
US healthcare is such a pain -- very high premiums, high deductibles, tons of paperwork, no price transparency.
My wife is from mexico, so while her visiting familly there I've had some opportunity to interact with and observe their system.
It seems better!
There are public hospitals which are open to all. The quality and wait times are reasonble, not fantastic. There is very little paperwork. (You don't have to jump through hoops like signing up for Medicaid or something.)
Alongside that, you can buy private insurance and go to private hospitals, which, in my (admittedly limited) experience, are very good -- efficient and reasonably priced. I would _guess_ because of less regulation and because they have to provide value above and beyond the free healthcare that's available?
In the US we seem to have created sort of the opposite incentive structure -- public healthcare is only available to a limited set of people, and everyone else is more or less forced into the private healthcare system (or "private", since it seems heavily intertwined w/ govt -- e.g., standard govt websites to pick a povider, tax penalty (tho since lifted) if you aren't signed up).
Somehow there's always a mountain of paperwork and bills that dribble in over months, and you never know how much the final cost is going to be.
Another seemingly-insane feature of the US system is if I pay for a service w/o insurance, I'll be billed some crazy rate. With insurance, I'll copay some reasonable-ish rate, and the insurance company will also pay some reasonable rate, often at like a 90% discount to the "quoted" rate. It feels like I'm coerced into insurance because I can't out-of-pocket pay the actual real reasonable rates.
Another annoyance is it also doesn't seem possible to buy insurance that just covers accidents, which I would personally do if I could...
- lurking_swe 1y ago> In the US we seem to have created sort of the opposite incentive structure -- public healthcare is only available to a limited set of people, and everyone else is more or less forced into the private healthcare system (or "private", since it seems heavily intertwined w/ govt -- e.g., standard govt websites to pick a povider, tax penalty (tho since lifted) if you aren't signed up). There is no “we”. The rich and influential people that run the US _designed_ the system this way on purpose. To extract as much money from citizens. We didn’t reach this point by accident. Is there a presidential party or candidate that’s running on “tear the whole stupid system down and rebuild it to be simple and affordable”? Little baby steps like obama care don’t count in my opinion. No reasonable person would design a healthcare system where a hospital charges $500 for dispensing ibuprofen for example. Or a system where it’s impossible to predict how much you’ll pay as a patient. And they call it a “marketplace” lol. That’s lunacy. If you know someone running on that as their campaign, please let me know. I’d be happy to vote for them. I’ll even donate to their campaign! > Another annoyance is it also doesn't seem possible to buy insurance that just covers accidents, which I would personally do if I could... That sounds like an interesting concept. Travel insurance is sort of like that, but not the same thing obviously.
- franktankbank 1y agoDon't know why you get downvoted but I hear you! This whole "extraction of money" is so stupid though, it is just reducing labor output nothing else, so goddamn stupidly greedy. Insurance should be for left field diagnoses and stay the fuck out of everything else. Right now payers are being leaned on as guardians of the purse strings which is incomprehensibly dumb.
- ponector 1y ago>> There are public hospitals which are open to all. No way they are open for all. Maybe emergency room is, but not whole hospital. If you have an unknown disease which is not an emergency (like some STD) - I highly doubt you can go strait to the hospital and get proper treatment.
- dilap 1y agoAll citizens, I meant, in case it was unclear from the context. Are there any hospitals anywhere that deny emergency treatment? I would be surprised.
- ponector 1y agoWhat I'm talking about is a citizen usually cannot come without months of waiting in a queue for a scheduled appointment with a reference from a family doctor unless into the emergency care.