Respectfully disagree. Recently leased a $60k car and I enjoy every single minute I'm driving it. I'm not paying for a transportation vehicle, I'm paying for joy and pleasure. What else should I spend money on? Burgers and coke?
/s Well - u could save up for cancer treatment /s Seriously though. Enjoy it. I had a cool sport car as a young-ish engineer and it gave joy after every long dreary day at the office.
It's super awesome to drive your expensive sports car at 5mph in stop and go traffic on the 101 or 405. s/ Just the best. /s
> This is what health insurance is for. You buy insurance so that you don't have to worry about monetary decisions and can make decisions based on quality of life. When it comes to big medical problems, health insurance is rarely 100% effective against monetary problems.
Of course it's not 100% effective, and nobody ever claimed it was. Health insurance in the US, after ACA, caps your costs at a predictable amount.
Just wait a minute. Even with your deductible and max out of pocket you will find that your provider was out of network or that drug isn't covered or that procedure wasn't. Or is considered experimental (when it isn't).. Or something was denied incorrectly and what not. Even in the best scenario say deductible only costs... say you get sick in December with a 15k deductible you're now at out of pocket 30k by February.
Right now my grandmother has stage 4 cancer, and has opted to not treat. The chances were very low for survival and the process painful. I'm pretty sure I would opt similarly if over 60. It sucks, and it's hard to see her that way. I'm heading over to see her after work in a few minutes (she's gotten worse the past couple days). I don't think it's responsible to always opt for treatment. It sucks and it's a hard deci…
Your family doesn't have to pay ANY of your medical bills when you die. Hospitals will try to guilt them into paying, but there's no legal obligation (this doesn't apply to spouses, but there are ways to protect them).
A spouse doesn't have to pay unless they cosigned.
For someone living in the Netherlands this sounds truly savage and heart breaking. I really, really wouldn't want to live in the US.
To play devil's advocate, looking at 5-year survival rates by country, you'd be 15-20% more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands. YMMV.
That's a surprising statistic given that life expectancy in Netherlands is almost 3 years more than in the US.
I'm sorry your family member went through this. That's terrible and no one should have to deal with that kind of treatment. I'll echo much of what you said. When I was 21, I was diagnosed and treated for malignant melanoma (skin cancer) that had metastasized to my lymph nodes. The treatment worked and I've been healthy for many years. That said, it changed the way and manner in which I deal with billing and insurance…
Great advice, thanks. ...also, you've called out a very significant pain point for lots of people in the American health system, i.e. managing and paying bills while dealing with the Kafka-esq processes. Your process is steps towards a solution. Can your process of ensuring bills are paid correctly be turned into a business? Can it sold as a service - not to hospitals, not to employers, not to insurance companies - b…
Yea, this sounds like a great idea. If I got a major sickness, I know I'm financially screwed anyway, even with insurance, because I have no idea how to navigate the insurance/hospital/doctor bureaucracy. I'd rather hire someone like OP to be my "health care agent" and do all this paperwork and chasing people down, in hopes he might be able to make my out of pocket bill $100K rather than $1M. That kind of service would be worth more than lawyers charge.
Source? The highest bracket kicks in a much lower salary in the UK and Germany than it does in the US. My income taxes were much lower in the US coming from Canada.
If your gross income is $80,000, overall federal income tax is 17%. There's also the 12.4% social security tax and the 2.4% Medicare tax, so the overall rate is 32%. State income tax varies (in CA it's 6% on the $80000, in TX it's 0%). The equivalent UK income is 61200 GBP. Income tax is is 21%, and National Insurance is 8% for 29%. This doesn't include the 20% VAT on most goods and services, but that also doesn't ap…
If you calculated the equivalent income by converting dollars to pounds, that isn't a good measure of equivalence. £61k is a huge salary, especially outside London. It's even high for a programmer 5 years in. Whereas there are plenty of roles that pay $80k, and it would be insulting for most programmers out of uni.
To play devil's advocate, looking at 5-year survival rates by country, you'd be 15-20% more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands. YMMV.
That's a surprising statistic given that life expectancy in Netherlands is almost 3 years more than in the US.
Japan's is more than the US, but less than Japanese-Americans. It might play out similarly for the Dutch.
If your gross income is $80,000, overall federal income tax is 17%. There's also the 12.4% social security tax and the 2.4% Medicare tax, so the overall rate is 32%. State income tax varies (in CA it's 6% on the $80000, in TX it's 0%). The equivalent UK income is 61200 GBP. Income tax is is 21%, and National Insurance is 8% for 29%. This doesn't include the 20% VAT on most goods and services, but that also doesn't ap…
If you calculated the equivalent income by converting dollars to pounds, that isn't a good measure of equivalence. £61k is a huge salary, especially outside London. It's even high for a programmer 5 years in. Whereas there are plenty of roles that pay $80k, and it would be insulting for most programmers out of uni.
You're right, using the PPP to GDP ratio says the pound has 1.11x the purchasing power of an equivalent amount of dollars. (equivalent meaning by foreign exchange rates)
Car insurance is sold in a 6-month or 12-month policy term, with a "lifetime limit" during that term. You can buy a new policy at the end of the term, but the insurance company isn't obliged to sell it to you.
Is there an explicit limit, or is it just implicit based on how many crashes you can possibly get into and get repaired within the policy period?
There are very explicit limits that you select when buying car insurance.
> Did you factor wealth into that? I would hazard a guess that the bottom 20%-40% in the U.S. would have a considerably lower survival rate than the average for the rest of the country. The population survival rates for cancer in the US are higher than any other OECD country. That already includes people who don't have insurance or otherwise can't afford treatment.
Yes, but let's say in the U.S. the numbers are 100% survival for the richest 50% and 0% survival for the other 50%. Clearly the average survival rate is 50%. Now let's say the Netherlands has a flat survival rate of 50%. If I don't consider wealth, it doesn't matter which country I get care in. If I'm at 49.999% of wealth in the U.S., the difference is 0% survival vs 50%. We know healthcare quality and healthcare cos…
> Yes, but let's say in the U.S. the numbers are 100% survival for the richest 50% and 0% survival for the other 50%. Clearly the average survival rate is 50%. Now let's say the Netherlands has a flat survival rate of 50%. If I don't consider wealth, it doesn't matter which country I get care in. If I'm at 49.999% of wealth in the U.S., the difference is 0% survival vs 50%.
Instead of just making up numbers that could hypothetically mean something, take a look at what's already been linked in this thread and you'll see that's not the case.