How to live on $432 a month in America

    > Frequently Asked Questions
    > Who qualifies for the Essential Plan?
    > Residents aged 19–64, living in New York, with incomes 138%–250% FPL (e.g., $21,597–$39,125 for a single adult in 2025), U.S. citizens or eligible immigrants, not on Medicaid or Medicare.

A vaguely well constructed place with a wood stove doesn't have to be damp and miserable. A sod hut is going to be. Imagine a tent except it has grass sod for a roof. It's going to be moist all the time.

Plenty of ye olden construction and heating methods are perfectly fine even today. A sod hut is not one of them.

no, its more like, what if you lived in a country where you were forced to buy a mercedes or die of starvation, regardless of your socioeconomic status.

I dont doubt that Canadian healthcare is deeply broken, considering its close proximity to the US system, leading to extreme pressure from perverse incentives.

I have spent the last two decades living in developing nations in Latin America, and I can say I have been very pleasantly surprised.

Where I am right now, The public systems cover 80 percent of what people need at no cost with government hospitals and clinics. Any community >200 people will have a clinic, and any reasonable town of a few thousand will have a hospital. There are government Pharmacies that distribute most common medications for roughly 25% of the standard (very low) pharmacy price.

Alongside this is a thriving system of private pharmacies and "clinics" Often, these are fully equipped hospitals, with trauma centers, cardiac units, the works.

One of the nearby ones, for example, consists of seven towers and many other buildings over several city blocks and includes hundreds of specialist practices, three separate hospitals, two imaging centers, etc. All fully for profit and privately held.

The cost at the clinics is typically about 10% - 20% of US cost, and includes the use of new, state of the art equipment from Siemens, GE Medical, etc.

Very good health insurance coverage for me, a 60 year old man, runs a little under $100usd a month, and covers 90-100 percent, including a reasonable allowance for vision and dental.

This is not a wealthy country, and the general tax rate paid by most people is a 20% sales tax on non-essential items, roughly 20% import tax on luxury goods and personal vehicles, a fairly high fuel tax for road use. There are other taxes for top 1% earners and corporate taxes, but they are not onerous.

The public and private system is thriving, and is becoming a hotspot for healthcare tourism for the USA and Canada.

Naked Greed is not the only way forward, and private / public hybrid systems can thrive side by side.

Its worth mentioning that the government provided insurance, typically extended mostly to mothers and children, is also pretty good, covering 100 percent, but each usage requires an approval process that may take several days. Anything else, you go to the hospital where they will provide primary care / stabilization if it is a complex situation requiring ongoing care.

On the government side, there is a clear priority towards care that can result in good outcomes. Pallitive care and diseases that inevitably result in near-term death are deprioritised under the public systems, and private insurance or families pick up the tab on those kinds of things.

There's a few problems here. Yes if you take total government expenditures per capita, he's not paying that much in taxes directly. But most of those costs are fixed. If a new person pops up in the US, it doesn't actually cost the federal government an extra $20k a year.

Over a century ago we decided that the more money you make the greater proportion of our total fixed costs you have to pay. There are various justifications for this, the more wealth you have the more you benefit from those government services, diminishing marginal unity of money etc...

But the point is if you're just going to look at total per capita expenditures, looking just at the federal level for simplicity, you need to make around $100k a year before your federal taxes exceed that.

By your argument anyone not making $100k a year is consuming more public money than they are returning and are thus a burden on society.

Your premise logically leads to that absurd conclusion. Obviously the rest of society is necessary in order for the people who do make $100k a year to exist. By your logic someone who lives on $5k a year but who writes open source software for free that some company uses to make $100 million dollar a year is a burden on society.

Someone who creates art that inspires millions of people, or someone who makes articles, games, or videos that provide millions of hours of entertainment, is a burden on society if they give away their work instead of sell it.

My mom was a burden on society because she raised children instead of working outside the home--even though she now has 3 adult children paying hundreds of thousands in taxes per year.

>It only really works out okay because not everyone is doing what the author does.

That's true of nearly every lifestyle you could recommend. Or hell even every piece of good financial advice.

Having 6 months of savings is almost universally considered sound financial advice. But if right now every consumer in America cut all of their discretionary spending to build up a 6 month cushion, it would completely destroy the economy.

That doesn't mean that it's not a valid recommendation for a financial advisor to make.

The author isn't recommending that everyone in America live this way, he's saying that if you can learn to live without all the things you think you need, this is an alternative. If you are the type of person who can't stand the idea of working a 9-5 for 40 years, this is something you can do.

Most people will never do this, but just the fact that it's available as a relief valve is I pretty amazing I think.

Perhaps you feel like this needs to be called out more explicitly rather than just hinted at. I think another concern that the author doesn't _highlight_ but is plenty clear is that this sort of lifestyle probably is more amenable to the able bodied, with their frequent allusions to hunting and fishing.

So while the author doesn't explicitly list out all possible issues, and everyone will have different priorities and opportunities in their life, I think the author is plenty clear on what they're describing, and the concern you raised is easily inferred from what they're saying.