321–330 of 431 posts
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The charges you mention are likely all from hospitals. How about Pluvicto for advanced prostate cancer at $42,500 per monthly dose? All the players are in on it. The sound way to manage costs and avoid these games is via Medicare for all, with premiums paid by progressive rate taxation of income. Maybe even wealth beyond a very large amount.
Currently insured Americans would likely be worse off under any plausible M4A plan.
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Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.
Men would rather build a continent-sized car-dependent infrastructure that deal with mentally ill homeless people on the subway...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The charges you mention are likely all from hospitals. How about Pluvicto for advanced prostate cancer at $42,500 per monthly dose? All the players are in on it. The sound way to manage costs and avoid these games is via Medicare for all, with premiums paid by progressive rate taxation of income. Maybe even wealth beyond a very large amount.
Currently insured Americans would likely be worse off under any plausible M4A plan.
Insurance is a pool. The bigger your pool the more you spread the risk/load. It’s brain dead simple. Medical care is a human right, beyond that.
Nothing about our system makes any sense and it is built to pad so many pockets in entirely opaque ways between you and the care you actually receive. Cut out several layers of middlemen and the costs go down. God forbid you have an accident and you end up at the wrong hospital when the one down the road is in-network but the one they took you to is out-of-network and you wake up owing thousands of dollars.
I had pretty good marketplace insurance this year but the plan I’m on now isn’t even offered anymore and if I got the next closest offered plan I’d be paying 6X as much for the premiums with higher copays on top. I’ll be switching to my union offered plan instead which is much better than the new marketplace plan but still worse than the marketplace insurance I had before.
The first sentence is your answer. The third word even. The healthcare market. MARKET Healthcare shouldn't be a market. That's why you're paying $40k.
I have the opposite viewpoint, and I lean heavily progressive in most of my views. Healthcare in the United States isn't a market, and that is why it is so terrible. For instance, there is no reasonable ability to compare prices of services. Prices are entirely hidden. Then there is the "with insurance" price vs cash prices. Healthcare doesn't function as a market, to our detriment.
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I can assure you they are, if anything, understated - as I am not including the expenses my health insurance will not cover. So no, you are fully in the wrong there. What do I have to do to prove it? Show you itemized receipts? Moreover, what are you even trying to accomplish by asking for this? Please provide me with a forthright defense of the modern U.S. health insurance markets and why it makes sense for me to ha…
Do you have non-ACA insurance? One explanation for why your costs are so much higher than the national average is that you're on a non-complying plan (you can also still buy plans that will exclude preexisting conditions --- they just can't be sold on the ACA marketplace). I'm pretty confident KFF isn't making these numbers up. As for your second question, one easy response is that prospective parents in other health…
Also when you’re beyond the Medicaid threshold but not that much beyond it absolutely sucks. One year I was paying for dramatically worse insurance with a deductible that would have just made it better for me to just not make more money because if I hit that deductible I would be net negative on my income vs the threshold for Medicaid.
Also I think this is such a false premise. You can still have private plans if you want in the UK or elsewhere with a public health system. Nobody is forcing you to use the public system if you don’t want to. To wit, I don’t have children but I still pay for schools with my taxes. You might not want to use the public health system and instead go private, but yes, you should still be paying for a freely accessible healthcare system.
Here’s the rub on that too: The prices we pay here are so much higher than in Europe even if you go private in those countries. Our system is terrible. Point blank.
I would agree that the NHS in the UK has gotten pretty bad. A large part of that is the result of the Tory government actively working against it though for a very long time. The waitlists for a lot of things are quite long and my fiancé who is from the UK and still lives there has to do some things there are crazy to me. On the other hand she still is able to get care freely. She’s paid private for some dental work but that also cost her pennies on the dollar compared to what I’d be paying if I did the same thing here.
If you’re happy with your insurance I am truly thrilled for you because I don’t think of that as being a common experience.
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car-dependent infrastructure and urban design is hostile to human life.
Car depend infrastructure is amazing to families. A mom can take her children to the grocery store in a car in relative safety without worrying about mentally ill homeless people on the subway.
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Car seats as contraception is just a specific enumeration of the general. "busybodies as contraception" problem wherein the "has so few real problems they stop minding their business and mind other's business" classes try to force priorities on the rest of society that the rest of society can't yet afford to have. And it's not just contraception or kids. Pretty much everything in our economy gets shot in the foot by…
Contraception is a bargain deal for any class, assuming you were not intending to have a kid. I also question the idea that safety regulations (let's call them that) are the result of a class of people who have "so few real problems they stop minding their business and mind other's business." I get the idea, but couldn't the high cost of obstetrics and child car seat requirements be due to the wishes and decisions of…
Of course, but life is just so easier when you can attribute every problem to an imaginary enemy.
Many countries have financial incentives provided to its citizens to have children. Requiring half of a citizens median salary to be given to a faceless middleman to provide this service seems untenable. I cannot imagine a society that does this would be able to survive.
When your country is led by a person who seems to find children and marriage inconvenient, you're bound to see that mentality propagate throughout everyday life
Unfortunately I'm type 1 diabetic which is either a death sentence there, or you are rich. But then I also accidentally broke my collarbone this summer. And I had this weird throat infection.
As a type 1 diabetic I have had to go to the ER numerous times in my life, and as traumatising as that experience can be, I can't imagine the feeling of also being financially ruined for the pleasure of not dying.
It's weird, I know plenty of people who avoid going to the doctor because it's annoying to wait for over an hour.. but I could see that for an American you might just NEVER go. I guess it's like, ok someone in the family is sick, and we're not rich, so we will sacrifice them to the sun gods. Or I guess you go into indentured servitude? There are people for whom $100k is made very very slowly.
I just do not get it! I guess these things add up properly if you are very wealthy, but people here think that it's the function of the society to make sure you can have basic things like medical treatment. Of course it's not perfect here... try going to the dentist for example. Then you're almost in the USA. Somehow it's not considered medical. A long session could run you over $500 or more.
I have compassion for all the USAians out there! If I was USAian and planning to have a child.. I guess I would consider just going to a civilized country for a while, like... I don't know, Rwanda or Ghana or somewhere that can afford people to be alive(?). In seriousness though (as those countries are very far) you could just go North or South. It's closer. If you go to Canada, a lot of times you wouldn't even need to present ID.. you could just.. get treated right there by walking into a hospital, being triaged, and then waiting (admittedly for maybe almost a day).
Always bring fun things to the hospital if you aren't literally bleeding out all over the place, because you'll be in the waiting room for 12 hours if you're in a big city.
But when it's over you're alive and about as rich as you were before. Seems like a good societal deal to me. I'm scared of being trapped somewhere like the US honestly. It's a nightmare scenario. Although I'm sure it's pretty great if you're a billionaire with slaves and so on... but someone has to incur that cost (the slaves from the lower castes).