The US healthcare system is making many people extremely rich. Someone has to pay for that.
Physicians and Pharmacists?
Physicians make 300k/yr, Pharmacists are a expensive dangerous rubber stamp.
I'm serious
US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
301–310 of 534 posts
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#302I moved to the US from a country with socialised medicine. When you include premiums then taxes in both were roughly similar if not a little higher in the US (ignoring cost of living differences). But even that doesn't include the real sting on the tail of US medicine. You pay a fairly high health insurance premium, but if you actually need health services you then pay again through the nose even with insurance "disc…
$300 is a steal.
Yeah, I saw that and thought "sign me up!" I paid $1200 for a chest X-ray at the emergency room in San Francisco (I was fine, but they understandably freak out about an adult male complaining about chest pain).
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the US you can happy if your cost for seeing a doctor is less than 4 digits. My wife and I have never paid four figures for a doctor visit, despite having two surgeries (one oral), a calf strain, and a dislocated shoulder (with ER visit) between us. The state of medical care in the US is bad enough as it is; you don't need to make up hyperbolic bullshit to make it seem worse.
You walked away from multiple ER visits including surgeries for less than four digits out of pocket? Maybe consider that your experience is the exceptional, not the people you call hyperbolic. My son had a laceration glued together (dermabond in lieu of one or two stitches) and that was either close to or slightly over four digits after totaling the hospital bill and doctor bill, both in network.
My son just had a laceration that needed closed up a week ago. We didn't even take him to the ER, just his pediatrician who saw him for all of 5 minutes. She didn't even use any skin adhesives to close up the wound, she just taped it together and called it good. $120 for literally putting on a bandaid that came apart before we even finished the car ride home leaving us to tape it up properly ourselves.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#304Yeah if you count non-tax expenses as tax, everybody is highly taxed. Let's lump in rent and food too.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
My family in Germany throws a fit when they have to pay 50 Euro for something. In the US you can happy if your cost for seeing a doctor is less than 4 digits.
> In the US you can happy if your cost for seeing a doctor is less than 4 digits. My wife and I have never paid four figures for a doctor visit, despite having two surgeries (one oral), a calf strain, and a dislocated shoulder (with ER visit) between us. The state of medical care in the US is bad enough as it is; you don't need to make up hyperbolic bullshit to make it seem worse.
It happens with high deductible plans.
When I had back surgery I was with a public employer PPO. Total out of pocket was like $300 for about $500k of procedures. Half the people in my recovery PT were selling cars and emptying 401ks to make the mortgage.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and cost of health insurance in Austria is just 7,65% of your income, and it covers your children. When I've worked in the US, I've paid just as much for health insurance and still had high out-of-pockets and deductibles on top of that.
For me it's the opposite. I moved from Denmark to the US, and I pay around $400 in health insurance premiums (health, eye, and dental) for a whole family. In Denmark, only health is covered, so for eye and dental many go out-of-country to get it cheap. The US is much cheaper for all health insurances, except if your poor. Obama tried to fix that, but made it worse and more expensive for everyone (socialism).
Did you check your employers contribution? Because at my US job, I paid around 340$ to insurance but the employer matched it with another 340$ to insurance, so insurance was actually 680$/month. A ridiculously bad deal considering there were still deductibles/out of pocket of a few thousand dollars and some differences based on whether I get in-network or out-of-network treatment.
> In Denmark, only health is covered, so for eye and dental many go out-of-country to get it cheap.
That kinda sucks for Denmark. In Austria, everything is included in the 7.5% that health insurance costs.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or really any public pension. I feel like if you're <40 then you should be planning for Social Security to not exist when you get old, anything else seems overly optimistic.
Social Security is just sending checks worth 3 or 4 percent of GDP to old people. It’s about the same as defense spending. Nobody ever worries about running out of money for defense.
Social Security spending is >2x the military budget, making up one third(!!!) of the US federal spending every year [1]. It's also a system that is inherently growing in terms of payouts and shrinking in terms of pay-ins [2]. This might not be a big deal if it was just a normal tax, but the idea behind Social Security is that your Social Security tax contributions pay off the current payouts. So if the system continued to exist as it is now, the amount paid into the system would have to grow significantly to ever pay out this generation's Social Security and the pattern would likely worsen over time.
[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1...
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then there's education costs in the US, say you want your kid to go to CalArts, that's $50,000 a year just for tuition, so your kid gets out of school $500k in debt with a degree in performance art and a $3,000 a month student loan payment for life.
On the other hand, a typical state college is closer to $10,000. Yes, it's not Ivy League, but it does the job.
Some of the best state schools (with huge endowments) are also trending downward in effective tuition.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait until you need dental surgery. I've never found a dental insurance that allows paying out more than $1,500/year. One gum graft alone is about $2,000. Dentures, replacement teeth, these all cost multiple thousands of dollars.
True. One thing I have noticed about dental though is that they give reasonable upfront estimates which is something most other doctors don’t do.
They do that to keep insurance away. Dentists have it much easier.
Re: US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who cares about the deductible? It’s still a ripoff. You should care about the deductible, cause you entered the contract, silly. Get private insurance in Germany, there's also a deductible, unless you want to pay more. > We went to an eye doctor and paid 25 Euro cash including an ointment. The US is just horribly expensive and very unpredictable. That's because of price fixing (GOÄ). It's all they can charge. And…
"You should care about the deductible, cause you entered the contract, silly." This is stupid. There is no real way to shop and bring down health insurance costs in the US. It's tied to your job, meaning you would need to get many job offers, and turn them down when you find out the actual insurance costs until you find one that's better, and ignoring other employment factors. And then everything can change the next…
Insurance isn't tied to your job. You can (and often should) forego the employer's plan and purchase insurance on the open market. Most insurances have some form of deductible, it's what keeps them affordable. Insurance should be protecting you against a huge financial fallout, not against petty expenses.
I agree it is a stupid system though and I'll tell you why: People want something for nothing. They want coverage for everyone, they don't want a tax, but they don't want compulsion to purchase and they also want to force insurers to take people with pre-existing conditions. Insurance can't work that way, the money has to come from somewhere.
If there was a compulsion to purchase, the system could work, as it does in many other countries. That's probably unconstitutional though, so it probably wouldn't stand.
Lastly you have "Medicare for all" which would basically bankrupt hospitals if you extrapolate from what current Medicare does to them financially.
You honestly can't blame representatives for dealing with voters that understand nothing and want everything. They voted for Obamacare, then they voted for Trump to make Obamacare even worse. I don't even want to know what's next...