I was paying around $1200/month last year (a little under that with subsidy).
This year I'm paying $2100/month for a family of five, on a roughly equivalent plan. Except, none of the options in my state allow me to visit the PCP I switched to this year (since none of the plans last year covered my PCP from the year before).
So I guess I'm on a primary care physician merry go round :D
I am at least able to have my main specialty doctor and the drug I take to keep me in remission from Crohn's disease, and my kids' pediatrician is covered.
But I can't imagine what people have to sacrifice to keep any kind of coverage (with high deductible and horrible coinsurance and prescription drug coverage) for their families if they don't have a decent income :(
> But I can't imagine what people have to sacrifice to keep any kind of coverage (with high deductible and horrible coinsurance and prescription drug coverage) for their families if they don't have a decent income :(
These increases are specifically a lapse in subsidies for high earners -- those with a "decent income." People under 400% of Federal Poverty Level still qualify for the subsidies. And it's a relatively recent policy change to roll back; we didn't have this subsidy from 2010-2020.
This is not specifically just a lapse in subsidies for high earners, this is for everyone which is telling how little people actually understand what will happen when the subsidies expire.
The enhanced subsidizes made it so people earning more than 400% FPL were also eligible for subsidies, but also more importantly increased the cap on how much income insurance could cost. In reality, most people would see their insurance costs double if the subsidys expired [1].
If you're getting health insurance through your employer, that's a pretty standard price (counting both your contribution and your employer's together).
I'm probably going to be self employed for 2026 and a cheap-ish (not the cheapest, but probably below the average) plan for my family is going to be a little under $1500 / month.
It's pre-tax money, which helps a wee bit, but it is definitely expensive. If I made less money, I'd qualify for subsidies, but I don't, so that's just something that needs to be paid in full unfortunately.
I’m in Germany, and for a family of four, the public healthcare system, covering my wife and my two kids costs us around 2,200€ per month. The company pays half.
A switch to a private insurance would lower the costs around half.
My Employer sponsored supposedly nice insurance (I say supposedly because they keep being a pain in the ass for pretty much everything) is $200+ per paycheck for me and my spouse, i.e. ~$450/month. That is after my employer covers most of the cost. This stuff is ridiculous.
Mine has tripled, but last year, I was actually getting some govt help. Not this year. I am fortunate to be able to afford it, but it’s just less than my mortgage.
This month is when all hell breaks loose, because people will get their first invoice at the new rate. They already know how much, but seeing it in the form of a demand, will drive it home.
Obamacare is like the NHS, in the UK. Everyone likes to bitch about it, but woe unto the politician that messes with it.
One thing that I’ve been trying to understand about this discourse:
Is the sum of the increase in costs some people are now paying greater than the subsidies that previously existed?
In other words: was there always a massive bill to be paid here, but it was just previously socialized and hidden in the form of taxes/ public debt? Or does the act of subsidizing it actually decrease the total?
There's a third piece too, which is that insurers are ramping price much faster than inflation. Our (unsubsidized) premiums increased 20% year-over-year, after also increasing faster than the rate of inflation the last few years.
Since premiums never decrease, one can pretty easily plot out that in the next ~decade we will see family premiums larger than the median salary. The economics of all this are going to get very weird in the near future.
Yes to both. High costs were previously partly hidden by subsidies for some consumers purchasing individual or family policies on state ACA exchanges, and now many of them will be forced to pay something closer to the true market price. But just like with college tuition, when the government throws money at a problem that ends up causing costs to explode without permanently improving affordability.
>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50.
Brutal.
Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".
> the previous administration thought everyone should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. Moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper
No, but it means I can't pay for a first-class ticket while someone else survives. I'll take that deal.
As a supporter of single payer(or really, anything else), I support this move. When half the nation is on subsidized healthcare they aren't so likely to care about costs.
Now, you have a lot more angry people, and hopefully that leads to real reform, because what we have now is unsustainable, even to upper middle class families.
ObamaCare (actually the Affordable Care Act: ACA) is a band-aid solution. It's a way to at least ensure that everyone has a pathway to insurance if they have enough money. Basically, the government negotiates some plans with private insurers and makes them available to the general population.
It's subsidized, but the new budget has drastically decreased these subsidies and so the cost to enroll in the ACA is about to go up for people who want to get insurance through their marketplace.
You comment sounds like snark but I understand if you don't know what Obamacare is.
(And I'm not an expert so hopefully people will correct any mistakes)
"Obamacare" was never healthcare for all. It is a GOP healthcare plan that heavily subsidizes private insurance. (Because free markets) And the current affordability crisis is the result of letting the government subsidies that help people pay for their Obamacare coverage lapse.
On a positive note: Obamacare (aka the ACA-PPP) did put some restrictions reasonable restrictions on the terrible things insurance companies used to do. For example, drop customers for "pre-existing conditions", impose lifetime payout maximums, etc.
Quick summary: the US does not have anything approaching a modern healthcare system. (And likely will not for quite some time due to a set of structural factors.)
Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA) was an attempt to expand coverage and slow the rate of increase of costs. It did the former but less well with the latter.
One other thing the ACA did is stop the scourge of scam insurers. This is a thing where people would pay for "insurance" and then find out later that their "insurance" did not actually afford them any meaningful coverage. The ACA tried to close a set of loopholes and overall regulate the insurance market more closely.
Anybody reading this from outside the US probably lives in a place where low-cost healthcare is more accessible than it is in the US.
Obamacare failed at reducing costs. It mostly focused on insurance expansion and in consumer protections, not on dealing with hospital, drug, and provider pricing structures that actually drive the spending in the US healthcare system.
Unfortunately not. It's still very broken, and next year it will be worse for a ton of people. I got AI to write a short answer for you:
> Short version: Obamacare never turned into “free primary care for everyone,” it was just a bunch of rules and subsidies bolted onto the same old private-insurance maze. It helped at the margins (more people covered, protections for pre-existing conditions), but premiums/deductibles can still go nuclear if you’re in the wrong income bracket, state, or employer situation. From an EU/Poland perspective it’s not a public health system at all, just a slightly nerfed market where you still get to roll the dice every year.
They stripped it of most meaningful changes to get it passed. What it ended up being was kind of the worst of both worlds. A federally related marketplace for private healthcare insurance. They did however ban coverage limits on “pre-existing conditions”. Before Obamacare an insurer could whine that you had cancer before signing up and refuse to cover your cancer care.
Is there a rich caste of doctors or pharmaceutical shareholders that don't need to work and live off these dividends? Or is the system so inefficient that most people in it aren't contributing to actual health care?
If you want to understand where the money is actually going then this Peter Attia Drive podcast episode with Dr. Saum Sutaria is the best high level overview that I've heard. Seriously it's worth listening to and will clear up a lot of the misconceptions that many people have.
I have some questions but I don't want to offend anybody. Aren't there any methods to contract the healthcare to lower the prices down? I heard that in UK they have some requirements that the prices must not go higher than... For a given type of service. Also I read a lot of articles that giving a tablet to a hospitalised person costs 20-50 bucks and people are generally running away from ambulances to not pay
People do do that in some limited cases, but it's often impractical. Two common cases are a) there is a need for urgent/emergency care; or b) the patient is generally frail and infirm. In these cases it can be impossible or impractical to arrange for treatment outside the US. That's leaving aside the logistical difficulty of arranging it (plus the costs for travel, etc. associated with carrying out the plan).
In case you are wandering where the money goes. If you need a gall bladder removed or an appendix removed the bill to you might be $10,000-30,000 but the surgeon, for all of their care and time with you, is compensated less than $100.
I'm confident a surgeon in America is paid more than 100$ for a surgery. They are paid about 400k a year on average. Do the math yourself.
On the other hand you provided no details as to where the money actually goes. It's not a simple proble, and part of the problem is that our doctors are paid a lot more than in peer nations
Yep, you and your employer pay $3500/month for the premium. Then you as an individual have a $12k to $15k per year deductible before the insurance even kicks in.
It's weird to me that americans, especially educated professional americans, have become much more quiet in their online presence due to all the crisis they are facing- what we have now is pretty different
PE is a convenient whipping boy but it's not the main problem. There has been so much consolidation of health systems and other provider organizations in some regions that they now effectively have monopolies, allowing them to jack up prices. The effect is largely the same whether the owner is a PE firm or a non-profit foundation. In order to counteract that we would need much more vigorous antitrust enforcement, which doesn't seem politically likely.
That’s a meaningless statement, look for an actual percentage here.
Healthcare costs have been spiraling for decades in the US, the ACA didn’t impact the long term trends to a noticeable degree. Actual healthcare reform could drive down costs massively, but that would mean a fuck load of people in medical billing getting laid off. Instead you’re paying for your doctor to talk with your insurance provider often for longer than they spend working with you, that’s the ultimate issue with US healthcare costs. Inflation adjusted “healthcare” spending is up from 2,100$/person in 1970 to 14,570 in 2023.
What did the ACA require that shouldn't be part of healthcare in one the wealthiest countries in the world?
Annual check ups? Cancer screenings? Maternity care? Basic mental health?
Forcing the insurance companies to accept patients with preexisting conditions?
These services should be available to everyone.
If a developed country cannot provide these things to its citizens it's a failing state in my book.
You don't need it until you need it, and needing it often comes in the form of a lightning strike from blue sky. The counterargument is that having everyone pay a higher amount makes it feasible to actually have this coverage available, when needed, without bankrupting the insurance companies, because the rare astronomically expensive care is covered by the premiums paid by the vast majority of people who are relatively healthy and are unlikely to need it.
Now whether the on-paper prices for medical care in this country actually have any relationship to objective reality is an entirely separate question of course. In general coming from an outside perspective, combining healthcare and for-profit motives in a single system seems particularly likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives, but, it's the system that exists, and it seems unlikely to change any time soon.
The main point of health insurance is to cover things that most people don't need. Prior to the ACA, most health plans had lifetime coverage limits which could leave patients with serious conditions financially ruined or unable to access care. The ACA removed those limits so naturally coverage is now more expensive.
Bronze plan is shitty catastrophic insurance at like 5x the actuarial cost to try to fund risk pool and all the mandated benefits thst the o/p alluded to
Which are the specific things you think most people don't need coverage for? Prior to the ACA, it was pretty common to hear stories of people not on employer plans who were shocked to discover a coverage gap they have. Most people don't have much expertise in evaluating healthcare coverage and deciding which services they might need.
> The end result is we all have Cadillac plans that most people don't need.
That's right, those pesky things the ACA says should be covered like emergency services, ambulances and prescription drugs is definitely the issue here. You've definitely found the problem.
I can't believe people keep repeating this lie. Did no one live prior to the ACA where you could easily go bankrupt because your insurance decided it didn't cover things like hospital bills? Because I sure as fuck remember, considering that's what bankrupted my parents.
It should be mentioned that the US has very high wages, and even when subtracting substantial health care insurance cost, the income likely remains higher than what people earn in most other countries.
If you have a high paying job in the US it usually comes with legitimate health insurance paid for by your employer, meaning most of the cost of most healthcare is covered.
If you don’t you pay a lot. Before ACA non-group plans generally didn’t cover any health conditions that predated your coverage.
ACA was just good enough to cool down demands for a true public health plan while also being just shitty enough to turn everyone else off to ever wanting one. Essentially the perfect way to prevent a public option for generations.
You should go tell that to the waiters who are working for tips.
Reads a bit like you’re in a bubble. I have friends in the States who work in education, construction, and hospitality. I similarly have friends working in those fields in EU. I’d say the ones in EU are better off _and_ don’t worry about healthcare.
Not to mention you get actual vacation time in Europe and a higher standard of living generally.
I was paying around $1200/month last year (a little under that with subsidy).
This year I'm paying $2100/month for a family of five, on a roughly equivalent plan. Except, none of the options in my state allow me to visit the PCP I switched to this year (since none of the plans last year covered my PCP from the year before).
So I guess I'm on a primary care physician merry go round :D
I am at least able to have my main specialty doctor and the drug I take to keep me in remission from Crohn's disease, and my kids' pediatrician is covered.
But I can't imagine what people have to sacrifice to keep any kind of coverage (with high deductible and horrible coinsurance and prescription drug coverage) for their families if they don't have a decent income :(
> But I can't imagine what people have to sacrifice to keep any kind of coverage (with high deductible and horrible coinsurance and prescription drug coverage) for their families if they don't have a decent income :(
These increases are specifically a lapse in subsidies for high earners -- those with a "decent income." People under 400% of Federal Poverty Level still qualify for the subsidies. And it's a relatively recent policy change to roll back; we didn't have this subsidy from 2010-2020.
This is not specifically just a lapse in subsidies for high earners, this is for everyone which is telling how little people actually understand what will happen when the subsidies expire.
The enhanced subsidizes made it so people earning more than 400% FPL were also eligible for subsidies, but also more importantly increased the cap on how much income insurance could cost. In reality, most people would see their insurance costs double if the subsidys expired [1].
[1] https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/aca-marketplace-prem...
You go without coverage of course. Unfortunately.
(It's getting late, Jeff. I'm heading to bed myself.)
I'm so, so sorry to hear this. Can you share which state you're in?
My man, this is the Raspberry Pi guy, Jeff Greeling. He lives in St. Louis, MO.
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Excuse me, but how in the world were you able to afford 1200/month, you know that's like cheap rent right?
If you're getting health insurance through your employer, that's a pretty standard price (counting both your contribution and your employer's together).
I'm probably going to be self employed for 2026 and a cheap-ish (not the cheapest, but probably below the average) plan for my family is going to be a little under $1500 / month.
It's pre-tax money, which helps a wee bit, but it is definitely expensive. If I made less money, I'd qualify for subsidies, but I don't, so that's just something that needs to be paid in full unfortunately.
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That’s absolutely not an exception.
I’m in Germany, and for a family of four, the public healthcare system, covering my wife and my two kids costs us around 2,200€ per month. The company pays half.
A switch to a private insurance would lower the costs around half.
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My Employer sponsored supposedly nice insurance (I say supposedly because they keep being a pain in the ass for pretty much everything) is $200+ per paycheck for me and my spouse, i.e. ~$450/month. That is after my employer covers most of the cost. This stuff is ridiculous.
You're still allowed to visit the same PCP although it might not be covered, or covered out-of-network with a higher patient responsibility.
Mine has tripled, but last year, I was actually getting some govt help. Not this year. I am fortunate to be able to afford it, but it’s just less than my mortgage.
This month is when all hell breaks loose, because people will get their first invoice at the new rate. They already know how much, but seeing it in the form of a demand, will drive it home.
Obamacare is like the NHS, in the UK. Everyone likes to bitch about it, but woe unto the politician that messes with it.
One thing that I’ve been trying to understand about this discourse:
Is the sum of the increase in costs some people are now paying greater than the subsidies that previously existed?
In other words: was there always a massive bill to be paid here, but it was just previously socialized and hidden in the form of taxes/ public debt? Or does the act of subsidizing it actually decrease the total?
There's a third piece too, which is that insurers are ramping price much faster than inflation. Our (unsubsidized) premiums increased 20% year-over-year, after also increasing faster than the rate of inflation the last few years.
Since premiums never decrease, one can pretty easily plot out that in the next ~decade we will see family premiums larger than the median salary. The economics of all this are going to get very weird in the near future.
Yes to both. High costs were previously partly hidden by subsidies for some consumers purchasing individual or family policies on state ACA exchanges, and now many of them will be forced to pay something closer to the true market price. But just like with college tuition, when the government throws money at a problem that ends up causing costs to explode without permanently improving affordability.
>Allen is herself a casualty. While she used to pay $487.50 a month, her new healthcare plan, with reduced coverage, has monthly premiums of $1,967.50.
Brutal.
Meanwhile the White House calls it all "fake news".
It's always cost ~$2k a month, the only difference is the previous administration thought everyone else should be "temporarily" paying for her plan.
I feel like we need a perpetual PSA here that moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper.
> the previous administration thought everyone should be "temporarily" paying for her plan. Moving money from person A to person B obviously doesn't make anything cheaper
No, but it means I can't pay for a first-class ticket while someone else survives. I'll take that deal.
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As a supporter of single payer(or really, anything else), I support this move. When half the nation is on subsidized healthcare they aren't so likely to care about costs.
Now, you have a lot more angry people, and hopefully that leads to real reform, because what we have now is unsustainable, even to upper middle class families.
when the gov foots the bill, there's no reason to have competition.
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No, it definitely did not always cost $2k a month.
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Guy from Poland here. What happened to ObamaCare? I thought you got finally a primary healthcare for all?
ObamaCare (actually the Affordable Care Act: ACA) is a band-aid solution. It's a way to at least ensure that everyone has a pathway to insurance if they have enough money. Basically, the government negotiates some plans with private insurers and makes them available to the general population.
It's subsidized, but the new budget has drastically decreased these subsidies and so the cost to enroll in the ACA is about to go up for people who want to get insurance through their marketplace.
You comment sounds like snark but I understand if you don't know what Obamacare is.
(And I'm not an expert so hopefully people will correct any mistakes)
"Obamacare" was never healthcare for all. It is a GOP healthcare plan that heavily subsidizes private insurance. (Because free markets) And the current affordability crisis is the result of letting the government subsidies that help people pay for their Obamacare coverage lapse.
On a positive note: Obamacare (aka the ACA-PPP) did put some restrictions reasonable restrictions on the terrible things insurance companies used to do. For example, drop customers for "pre-existing conditions", impose lifetime payout maximums, etc.
1 reply →
Quick summary: the US does not have anything approaching a modern healthcare system. (And likely will not for quite some time due to a set of structural factors.)
Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act or ACA) was an attempt to expand coverage and slow the rate of increase of costs. It did the former but less well with the latter.
One other thing the ACA did is stop the scourge of scam insurers. This is a thing where people would pay for "insurance" and then find out later that their "insurance" did not actually afford them any meaningful coverage. The ACA tried to close a set of loopholes and overall regulate the insurance market more closely.
Anybody reading this from outside the US probably lives in a place where low-cost healthcare is more accessible than it is in the US.
2 replies →
Obamacare failed at reducing costs. It mostly focused on insurance expansion and in consumer protections, not on dealing with hospital, drug, and provider pricing structures that actually drive the spending in the US healthcare system.
Unfortunately not. It's still very broken, and next year it will be worse for a ton of people. I got AI to write a short answer for you:
> Short version: Obamacare never turned into “free primary care for everyone,” it was just a bunch of rules and subsidies bolted onto the same old private-insurance maze. It helped at the margins (more people covered, protections for pre-existing conditions), but premiums/deductibles can still go nuclear if you’re in the wrong income bracket, state, or employer situation. From an EU/Poland perspective it’s not a public health system at all, just a slightly nerfed market where you still get to roll the dice every year.
They stripped it of most meaningful changes to get it passed. What it ended up being was kind of the worst of both worlds. A federally related marketplace for private healthcare insurance. They did however ban coverage limits on “pre-existing conditions”. Before Obamacare an insurer could whine that you had cancer before signing up and refuse to cover your cancer care.
Where does all that money go to, though?
Is there a rich caste of doctors or pharmaceutical shareholders that don't need to work and live off these dividends? Or is the system so inefficient that most people in it aren't contributing to actual health care?
If you want to understand where the money is actually going then this Peter Attia Drive podcast episode with Dr. Saum Sutaria is the best high level overview that I've heard. Seriously it's worth listening to and will clear up a lot of the misconceptions that many people have.
https://peterattiamd.com/saumsutaria/
Both. Also there's a culture of infinite consumption of medical services.
I have some questions but I don't want to offend anybody. Aren't there any methods to contract the healthcare to lower the prices down? I heard that in UK they have some requirements that the prices must not go higher than... For a given type of service. Also I read a lot of articles that giving a tablet to a hospitalised person costs 20-50 bucks and people are generally running away from ambulances to not pay
Corrupt congress people will vote down any such proposals.
Nationalize health care. Doctors should work for the government, hospitals should be owned by the government; for profit health care is a scam.
At what point does it become a better financial decision to do telehealth and medical procedures completely in a different country?
Can you be health insured outside of the country you live?
People do do that in some limited cases, but it's often impractical. Two common cases are a) there is a need for urgent/emergency care; or b) the patient is generally frail and infirm. In these cases it can be impossible or impractical to arrange for treatment outside the US. That's leaving aside the logistical difficulty of arranging it (plus the costs for travel, etc. associated with carrying out the plan).
In case you are wandering where the money goes. If you need a gall bladder removed or an appendix removed the bill to you might be $10,000-30,000 but the surgeon, for all of their care and time with you, is compensated less than $100.
I'm confident a surgeon in America is paid more than 100$ for a surgery. They are paid about 400k a year on average. Do the math yourself.
On the other hand you provided no details as to where the money actually goes. It's not a simple proble, and part of the problem is that our doctors are paid a lot more than in peer nations
Bullshit. Even Medicare will pay a surgeon about $600 for CPT code 44970 and commercial health plans are higher than that.
I read healthcare now amounts to buying a new car every year. (Except, of course, nothing new in your driveway, nothing to resell, etc.)
This is misleading.
Health insurance premiums cost about as much as buying a new car every year. Healthcare is generally on top of those premium payments.
Yep, you and your employer pay $3500/month for the premium. Then you as an individual have a $12k to $15k per year deductible before the insurance even kicks in.
1 reply →
It's weird to me that americans, especially educated professional americans, have become much more quiet in their online presence due to all the crisis they are facing- what we have now is pretty different
Private equity should be banned from healthcare.
What could go wrong putting a bunch of finance bros at the wheel of a "Pay this amount or suffer/die" industry?
PE is a convenient whipping boy but it's not the main problem. There has been so much consolidation of health systems and other provider organizations in some regions that they now effectively have monopolies, allowing them to jack up prices. The effect is largely the same whether the owner is a PE firm or a non-profit foundation. In order to counteract that we would need much more vigorous antitrust enforcement, which doesn't seem politically likely.
The ACA required health insurers to cover a laundry list of things they didn't previously cover.
It's nearly impossible to buy a legitimate low premium high deductible plan now.
The end result is we all have Cadillac plans that most people don't need.
> laundry list of
That’s a meaningless statement, look for an actual percentage here.
Healthcare costs have been spiraling for decades in the US, the ACA didn’t impact the long term trends to a noticeable degree. Actual healthcare reform could drive down costs massively, but that would mean a fuck load of people in medical billing getting laid off. Instead you’re paying for your doctor to talk with your insurance provider often for longer than they spend working with you, that’s the ultimate issue with US healthcare costs. Inflation adjusted “healthcare” spending is up from 2,100$/person in 1970 to 14,570 in 2023.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
What did the ACA require that shouldn't be part of healthcare in one the wealthiest countries in the world?
Annual check ups? Cancer screenings? Maternity care? Basic mental health? Forcing the insurance companies to accept patients with preexisting conditions?
These services should be available to everyone.
If a developed country cannot provide these things to its citizens it's a failing state in my book.
"ACA required stuff" is a fox news talking point.
You don't need it until you need it, and needing it often comes in the form of a lightning strike from blue sky. The counterargument is that having everyone pay a higher amount makes it feasible to actually have this coverage available, when needed, without bankrupting the insurance companies, because the rare astronomically expensive care is covered by the premiums paid by the vast majority of people who are relatively healthy and are unlikely to need it.
Now whether the on-paper prices for medical care in this country actually have any relationship to objective reality is an entirely separate question of course. In general coming from an outside perspective, combining healthcare and for-profit motives in a single system seems particularly likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives, but, it's the system that exists, and it seems unlikely to change any time soon.
That’s how insurance works. You pay for a plan you likely don’t need so everyone older than you is reasonably covered.
If young people elected to get a barebones plan while in good health, who would subsidize them when they grow older?
That’s not how insurance works. No insurance company coerces you to buy it, as Obama did.
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The main point of health insurance is to cover things that most people don't need. Prior to the ACA, most health plans had lifetime coverage limits which could leave patients with serious conditions financially ruined or unable to access care. The ACA removed those limits so naturally coverage is now more expensive.
This is factually incorrect and in fact the opposite of what a Cadillac plan means.
Obamacare plans are actually the opposite: they are high deductible with limited networks.
Obamacare plans typically have deductibles between $5,000 to $9,000, with a narrow selection of networks, and high premiums if unsubsidized.
This is the opposite of what a a Cadillac plan is (or used to be).
Have you been on an ACA bronze plan? I wouldn’t consider it a Cadillac plan nor did I find it covering lots of unnecessary things.
Bronze plan is shitty catastrophic insurance at like 5x the actuarial cost to try to fund risk pool and all the mandated benefits thst the o/p alluded to
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Which are the specific things you think most people don't need coverage for? Prior to the ACA, it was pretty common to hear stories of people not on employer plans who were shocked to discover a coverage gap they have. Most people don't have much expertise in evaluating healthcare coverage and deciding which services they might need.
In California, apparently acupuncture is required to be covered. I’d be happy to give up my acupuncture coverage for a lower premium. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/states-essential-bene...
> The end result is we all have Cadillac plans that most people don't need.
That's right, those pesky things the ACA says should be covered like emergency services, ambulances and prescription drugs is definitely the issue here. You've definitely found the problem.
I can't believe people keep repeating this lie. Did no one live prior to the ACA where you could easily go bankrupt because your insurance decided it didn't cover things like hospital bills? Because I sure as fuck remember, considering that's what bankrupted my parents.
https://archive.is/UwqzL
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It should be mentioned that the US has very high wages, and even when subtracting substantial health care insurance cost, the income likely remains higher than what people earn in most other countries.
If you have a high paying job in the US it usually comes with legitimate health insurance paid for by your employer, meaning most of the cost of most healthcare is covered.
If you don’t you pay a lot. Before ACA non-group plans generally didn’t cover any health conditions that predated your coverage.
ACA was just good enough to cool down demands for a true public health plan while also being just shitty enough to turn everyone else off to ever wanting one. Essentially the perfect way to prevent a public option for generations.
You should go tell that to the waiters who are working for tips.
Reads a bit like you’re in a bubble. I have friends in the States who work in education, construction, and hospitality. I similarly have friends working in those fields in EU. I’d say the ones in EU are better off _and_ don’t worry about healthcare.
Not to mention you get actual vacation time in Europe and a higher standard of living generally.
yes, but the people in europe aren't free(tm) /s
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