Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
1–10 of 129 posts
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#2Pure madness. How are you supposed to pay that?
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#3Not having health insurance is not an excuse.
In Germany you are required by law to have it.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#4Not having health insurance is not an excuse. In Germany you are required by law to have it.
In Germany, does your health insurance cost >$600 per month for 1 person if your employer or government doesn't subsidize it (for example, if you are self-employed and earning more than minimum wage from it)?
Because that's the case in the US.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#5The bill is crazy, but this person won’t have to pay a 10th if it if they call the billing department.
Being uninsured is actually something of a blessing in the United States in this situation. If you have health insurance (often with bad coverage and high deductibles), you’ve agreed to waive your ability to negotiate and to pay whatever bill they’ve sent you.
Not so for the uninsured.
The whole billing system in the United States is beyond fucked up.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#6Not having health insurance is not an excuse. In Germany you are required by law to have it.
In the USA, acne and pregnancy are often disqualifying conditions. Services are often "out-of-network."
So it doesn't matter if you pay the pemiums or not - you get massive surprise bills.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#7Not having health insurance is not an excuse. In Germany you are required by law to have it.
In Germany insurers are required by law to provide a minimum standard of coverage comparable to some of the best employer-provided healthcare in the US, insurance costs are heavily regulated and progressive, all employers are required to cover part of the cost, treatment price is heavily regulated, and no one can be rejected.
Absolutely none of this is true in the US.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#8You could buy 0.018 Tomahawk missiles for that or treat 54 people for every Tomahawk missile fired.
All of the Tomahawk missiles fired since 2001 would have provided 119.000 people with free Corona treatment.
I am thinking that countries with free healthcare care more about keeping their own people healthy than dropping missiles and misery on other countries people.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#9Not having health insurance is not an excuse. In Germany you are required by law to have it.
This person is actually going to pay less than many people who are insured precisely because they’re uninsured.
Someone who is insured in the US is not allowed to negotiate.
This person can call the billing department and say “I can’t pay” and watch that bill plummet.
The 50% or so of Americans who get their healthcare from solid employers will exhaust their deductible but otherwise be generally fine. Then there’s another chunk of people on Medicaid and Medicare (government healthcare for elderly or poor) who would be fine in this situation.
The group of people in the United States who are screwed fall into a few categories: hourly workers who aren’t offered insurance or who are offered bad insurance from their employers, or business owners that have to self insure.
The ACA (Obamacare) attempted to help this situation by making health insurance mandatory and essentially going the route of Germany, but the mandate has been handicapped by numerous compromises in the bill itself, court rulings, and political turmoil. Also the high unregulated cost of drugs doesn’t help. It was not able to defeat the for-profit health insurance industry.
It’s wild to me that these political parties that claim to be pro-business don’t support separating healthcare coverage from employment. This is probably because of status-quo lobbying and a desire to keep people wage enslaved until retirement age.
Re: Total Cost of Her Covid-19 Treatment: $34,927.43
#10After this is over, the saddest possible outcome is if America returns to the same systems, having learned nothing. I don't expect it at all, but I've been more surprised in the past.