Health insurance

I sometimes refer the US in discussions as "worlds richest 3rd world country"

I'm thinking of calling it the post-developed country where all the goodwill of the generations past rotted into a nasty, greedy mess

Ah, but our healthcare system is the best in the world—for shareholders. It's a highly advanced system for extracting money from people with health problems.

Gene Simmons is an ultracapitalist bastard who only went into rock music for the money. Fuck Kiss. I don't listen to that shit.

Guess I'm taking Lyft then

"Well, he probably didn't need to be airlifted because of... what was it again?"

"His car was hit by a car and went down the side of a mountain into an area that they couldn't get to by road."

"Right, he probably didn't need to be airlifted because of that. He just chose to get airlifted."

— air transport insurance, probably

Back when I was on reddit I had seen few people who had left america for other countries mainly in the Europe region because america is a shithole

Found the European (or just someone young who doesn't know much about typical insurance shell-gaming).

You have no copay, but most insurance plans include any non-preventative visit in the deductable. That means you are responsible for 100% of the bill until your $1500/yr deductible (in as low deductible-plan, a LOT higher in most plans) is reached. To look like they're actually doing something, they treat the negotiated rate from the doctor's MSRP as a "discount" (the doctor says $300, the insurance negotiates you to $200). The really ugly irony of that, is that if you were uninsured, many offices would have given you an NP for $70, and some have an "uninsured rate" of like $150.

Nope, in network, that's just how their insurance worked.

This isn't necessarily true. I've seen and heard of multiple doctors who had a lower price for those without insurance.

The only time you’re better off without insurance is if you never use it.

This is absolutely not true. I have a high-risk, high-expense family member on my plan. Most years, we reach her deductible at the very end of the year and we're ultimately paying all that money for "a rate plan". Of the years we crossed the deductible and the insurance covered much of anything, it was still less than the $12,000 we shelled out that year in all but one case. In that one case, we saved about $5000, still a bit less than the overall money they've made off us. Literal cancer wasn't enough to make health insurance a good investment.

We still need it for three reasons. First, "what if you end up needing $100,000 or more in medical procedures". Second "the doctor won't be able to see you for 6 months unless you're insured" (though this sometimes goes the other way). And finally, it's a lot less of a financial drain through my employer as a pre-tax expense. Napkin math makes it $3-4000/yr saved in taxes.

They’re also negotiating the price down. Without insurance you’re pretty much bare assed to the healthcare industry, who can and will charge you whatever they want

This might surprise you, but many offices have "uninsured rates" because hitting someone with a $2000 bill for 5 minutes of time is a great way to have someone in collections for years and not actually see the money. They often do that alongside inferior service like an NP instead of a Doctor, but I've never found an office or hospital group who didn't do something for uninsured folks. And you're missing that they charge these things for insured folks much of the time to leverage their negotiated rates with hospitals.

The insurance company will require them to verify the hours billed, they’ll reject charges for shit they shouldn’t be billing for, and negotiate down the price of stuff they can bill for.

Oh, you're not talking about usual hospital bullshit? You're talking about fraud? Yeah. You call them on it once and that disappears from an entire bill. Most hospitals around here don't do it anymore because there's too much attention on them. TBH, the same hospitals you're talking about are are often getting away with coding fraud, which is still reaching the patient's wallet.

The difference even for simple visits can but several thousand dollars. For more serious visits the sky is the limit.

The "sky is the limit" is basically the only time insurance is cheaper than not being insured. And why the government really needs to become a singlepayer for healthcare costs.

Nope, when I ditched my insurance from that company and had to go to my regular doctor, it was $65 up front and I didn't see another bill. It was the most bullshit thing I've experienced.

Yeah it sucks, but a lot of common costs are covered, like going to the ER after an accident.

It is often called catastrophic insurance, it doesn’t cover much day to day costs, but when you get a $50,000 bill it would cover $42,000.

I'm paying a $2000 bill right now. Without insurance, it would be more like $50,000. And a surgery I had last year, they delayed because the insurance company didn't want to cover it at first and we would have to give them $1500 up front. Thankfully, that got taken care of. Still had to pay that $1500 though. I just could pay it in installments.

Hasn't america's CIA meddled with other countries before by assassinating people and members of government

If I recall correctly they assassinated left wing government members in the past

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#:~:text=Operation Condor (Spanish%3A%20Operaci%C3%B3n%20C%C3%B3ndor,leaders%20in%20South%20America%20from

Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for that kind of thing to happen. CT scanners aren't common because they're expensive as fuck, as is its maintenance. Not every public hospital has it and if it's underfunded, that's usually one of the first equipments to stop working, because that maintenance money will pay for higher priority materials.

To be fair, he has American citizenship, so he is an American.

There's multiple organizations that buy medical debt, but it's not as good as it looks.

They are buying debt that is likely to never be collected anyway, from people that have no income to take.

The whole reason they are willing to sell it for a fraction of its nominal value, is they thinks it's worth even less than that.

The debtor will get notified it's been forgiven, which is nice, but even their credit score won't change in most situations because these debts are being sold for cheap because it's long past the limit for credit reporting (7 years).

Tottaly