651–660 of 954 posts
I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence. ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, hel…
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I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence. ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, hel…
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As a non-american (from South America) who lived in both USA an Europe: Yes, in USA you get much more money, like you said 2x~5x, but then: University is expensive as fck. Health care is expensive as fck. You have 5 days of paid sick leave per year in most companies. You have 10 days of paid holidays per year in most companies. In contrast, in Europe: University was cheap or free. Healthcare is cheap and universal. I…
> University is expensive as fck. One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay. For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow simi…
This is such a weird excuse for bad policy. Making more money[0][1] somehow means its okay to saddle students with an average debt of $30-40 thousand dollars. A downpayment on a first home would be a much better use of that money, for example.
Really, the average US citizen is nickel and dimed to death with this sort of thing, from health insurance, to dental, to lots of other required but not accounted for as required costs (like cars and associated car insurance).
Not to mention, we have little safety net in the US, you're really going to hurt if you have a bad run of luck after job loss. No qualms in allowing people to become homeless as a matter of policy.
If someone were to ask me, I would say that we in the US have it completely backwards in respect to how the average citizenry is expected to live. Its not thriving, its constantly having some kind of lingering potential disaster to plan for.
[0]: which I sincerely wonder about the true veracity of this statistic
[1]: Don't forget too, that more and more struggle to pay their student loans each year and the trend has generally been that its getting worse, not better.
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The whole time I was reading this, as someone from the U.S., I was wondering what country the writer was from, because it sure as #$@! wasn't written by someone in the U.S. When I got to that part, I was, "Oh. Okay. That makes sense."
In the US, you'll be billed the maximum out of pocket for your health insurance whether your little one is in the ICU for months or whether it was a easy delivery though, so at least birth is a predictable medical expense.
There’s something absurd about a hospital charging 195k for 4 hours of work with the end result of the patient being dead. Not saying the doctors did anything wrong but… oof
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> University is expensive as fck. One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay. For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow simi…
>The average US college student graduates with around $30-40K debt depending on whether they go public or private, which isn't all that hard to pay off when our wages are already significantly higher than other countries. We're especially lucky in tech where our compensation differential relative to other countries more than makes up for the cost of university education. This is such a weird excuse for bad policy. Ma…
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The United States is a democracy, but more specifically, a representative democracy. That means citizens don’t directly vote on most laws or policies—aside from certain state or local measures—but instead elect representatives to make those decisions on our behalf. The idea is that we trust them to act in our best interests. You can probably see where the problem comes in. Take, for example, a politician who campaign…
Ah, so Americans are okay with that system as well. Got it.
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They are referring to the price that hospitals charge for aspirin, which is massively inflated, not the off the shelf cost of aspirin
Where in their comment do you see them referring to hospital care?
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> University is expensive as fck. One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $60K/year tuition prices. US universities charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay. For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow simi…
> For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow similar patterns resulting in a large percentage of students paying no tuition, the middle ground of students paying some fraction, and a small number of students from wealthy families subsidizing everyone else. As someone from a country (Sweden) that to a larger…
I'm not saying the European system is bad. Certainly there's a lot to complain about with a system that asks 18 year olds to make life-defining decisions about both their career and their financial prospects. But the differences do go beyond whether or not you're on the hook for your tuition.
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FSA's not HSA's are use-it-or-lose-it. If you have a FSA I strongly suggest that you get an HSA instead. https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/hsa-vs-...
A lot of people with FSAs will have insurance that disqualifies having an HSA. I have the paranoid idea that they designed FSAs in such a goofy way for budget scoring and it drives me nuts.