Well, here in Germany you’re paying (you have to) around 15% of your gross income for health insurance plus 3.4% for intensive care insurance. Your employer pays for half of those. Insurances are expensive but if you need them it’s cheaper than paying for treatment yourself. What I pearsonally find worse is the public tv and radio fee you have to pay each month (18 euros, same as netflix premium) to finance some dickwad director earning 200k+ even if you don’t watch or even have a tv/radio. Also it doesn’t matter how much you earn, the fee is the same.
So workers pay 7.3% and employers pay 7.3%? It covers all of your health care costs? U.S. insurance varies in cost but we have medical bills on top of insurance costs.
But what does your insurance pay for if not the medical bills? It’s supposed to be its entire purpose, pay the medical bills.
Insurance companies put enormous amounts of resources, time, and manpower into avoiding paying the bills. They’ll find some excuse buried in their 400 page packet, or they’ll deem something not a “medical necessity “ until it’s too late to do anything about it.
I received a HEART TRANSPLANT and my insurance tried to kick back one of my echo-cardiograms that I get quarterly to make sure my donor heart isn’t being rejected. They’re ridiculous.
There’s different tiers, but in the case of a doctor visit and prescriptions for medication, you typically have a copay amount which insurance does not cover. If you have a serious illness and require treatment in the hospital you would be required to pay 30%-40% of the total bill. Also some insurance requires that you pay a certain amount per year before it will take effect, then the insurance pays the rest for the year. There’s tons of different plans and scenarios, insurance here is a rip off.
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Exactly! It’s ridiculous. My father is disabled and on a fixed income. He has insurance but his treatment still costs him thousands a year, even though he only receives a few thousand to live on.
Yep, all covered except for some extra stuff like getting your teeth deep-cleaned by your dentist or some premium dental prosthetics, but they usually subsidize it. Edit: also having most people enrolled in the public insurance (wealthier people have private insurance) makes this system possible, at least for now.
The public broadcasting fees are important to prevent private monopolies. To add some context to non germans: The most people here who cry about the fee are far right wingers because the public channels are the only ones really doing work to uncover things like Nazis in the police.
And if you are without a job you dont have to pay it.
I find it interesting that u mention the German public broadcasting fee in a post about healthinsurance fees. Anyway I see the point why some criticise this specific fee. Imo the fact that is actually a separate “fee” and not hidden behind general state funding as taxes is the problem why people even mention it. Obviously when we would talk about taxes you will see there are much more fucked up ways where your tax is wasted. Anyway most of Europe does indeed have public broadcasting that is funded by public money. That is because they are indeed supposed to serve the public. In the EU, they are organized in the Eu Broadcasring Union. There is are very lengthy wiki articles on the history on PB or the EBU. However the gist of why this is such a vital concept could maybe summarized as " EBU members are public service media (PSM) broadcasters whose output is made, financed, and controlled by the public, for the public. PSM broadcasters are often established by law but are non-partisan, independent and run for the benefit of society as a whole."
This is very ironic if you work for an insurance company.
I imagine working for a major health insurance provider… One would use them for health insurance?
If you mean specifically health insurance… yeah this is spot on.
I think it’s more complicated for other kinds of insurance though.
Health insurance shouldnt be health insurance.
It should just be health care.
Absolutely agree.
And to your point, traditional insurance (home, auto, etc) pretty much targets a specific profit margin of about 3% or $0.03 for every dollar they take in. They tend to get eaten alive by competition when they get greedy, unlike a lot of other industries. But rates increase as costs increase ro maintain that 3% target…and costs have increased a LOT in recent years.
It’s a pretty misunderstood industry tbh, and not without its own issues for sure. But overall it has its purpose and is heavily regulated to ensure they’re playing responsibly. They earn their money on investing the money they take in, and basically take the bet that they can earn more in the market than the risk they take on for every policy sold.
I basically agree. Those are actually insurance, and serve a purpose. Health “Insurance” isn’t insurance at all really…
Yes, agree with that. Health Insurance is just to ensure you have to have a job it feels like.
Would be a shame if you had an…accident
Has an accident
Insurance company that won’t help you: … Isn’t that a shame :(
You’re paying for a service. How much of your paycheck are they taking anyway? Mine is less than 5%. $70 a week. It’s not a whole lot.
So nearly 300$ a month for…what exactly? To be denied life saving treatment?
Even if you have no insurance, they will not deny you life-saving treatments.
It happens all the time. You’re thinking of emergency life-saving treatment. They won’t let you bleed out on the hospital steps. But insurance denies necessary care for chronically ill people because it’s deemed unnecessary by them.
Not on paper, but they absolutely fucking will in person. They’ll tell you your fine, they’ll tell you the wrong thing, and then they put off your appointments and then your dead.
They have a duty of care. The doctors are not administration. Administration cares about profits. The doctors just get paid regardless.
ON PAPER They have a duty of care. In real life all they give a shit about is you not dying in front of them. If you’re lucky. Sounds like you are. Maybe in your happy little corner of the fucking world it’s all morphine and triage, but here DOCTORS in the emergency room will only do enough to keep you from dying in front of them. You’ll have a stroke and they won’t do any follow up care and you’ll have another one two weeks later and you’re dead, because the doctors wouldn’t let you make an appointment in time.
Also they’ll cut off your fucking leg because it’s cheaper than reconstruction, and not just because reconstruction is impossible.
Also just realized dumbass OP up there casually dropped that he’s loaded and the rest of us are just stupid for being poor.
Don’t bring logic into these comments
They didn’t though…
statistically Americans pay twice as much in insurance and taxes as Europeans pay in just taxes for healthcare
When I hear that I also think of Canada and their massively overwhelmed healthcare system. Just remember. If you’re suffering because you can’t get the care you need you can now just ask to die.
Are you saying that people should die instead of of being treated, when a treatment is possible, just because they cannot afford it?
I’m referencing Canadas MAID law that has become an absolute disaster causing or allowing the medical system to recommend suicide for those with solvable problems instead of solving those problems.
Canada’s MAID law is not a disaster and that’s speaking as a Canadian.
Ten seconds on Google brought up the follow up to this story from March 10, 2023.
Do you think the mistakes of a single employee that the system’s check and balances would have caught justifies discrediting the entire system?
Because the same chucklefucks that keep pushing to provatise insurance even harder in the US are defunding Canadian health systems so 1. It can’t be used as an argument against privatisation and 2. They can go ‘look at how badly this works, we should provatise Canadian healthcare!’
They create the problem with Canadian healthcare, and then offer a solution that puts half the money in their own pocket.
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OK Boomer
What about the money your company pays for the healthcare? I only see ~$350 a year deducted from my paycheck to pay for my insurance, but according to my W2, my employer pays another $8,000 per year to the insurance company. You’re paying a lot more for your health insurance than you see on your paychecks.
So many fucking people fight me on this…
The company sees your benefits as part of your total compensation. They factor all of it in when considering your “value.” If they weren’t paying the insurance they’d need to pay you more to maintain a level of competitiveness that they claim the benefits add… Not to mention if everyone working paid a healthcare tax there’s no way in fucking hell it would be $1,200+ a month like it currently is… Not to mention eliminating the need for profits which add to the costs…
Ever had to fight with an insurance company?
I have insurance. I went to urgent care when I was pretty sure I had the flu or COVID or something about a year ago (just slightly before COVID was declared “over.”) I paid my copay for doctors office visit, I was in there for about an hour, with roughly 40 minutes of that sitting in a room waiting for a doctor (in an empty clinic) and then had a flu test and a COVID test.
They still sent me to collections for $350 for this visit. I pay a stupid amount for insurance, which my employer subsidizes, and I still can’t even get a fucking flu/COVID test apparently.
For profit health insurance in America is evil. It is easily one of the most fucked up things about this country that we just absolutely ignore.
Sorry you had to deal with that.
Thanks. I mean, I’m fine. I’m sorry that this is the reality for the simplest of things in this country.
Thanks Obamna.
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This is part of the system, and spoilers, it’s still the fault of for-profit insurance. Why do doctors offices screw up? Because every insurance provider negotiates a different rate, what is covered, etc. This office is going to bill one provider $3,000 for an MRI, another provider $27, another one $2799, and another one nothing. And if you go an office over, it’s going to be a whole different set of numbers. And then repeat that for basically every procedure, visit type, etc.
This is a decent part of the reason why Americans pay more than just about any other country for healthcare. We spend billions more per year on exclusively middle-men who are just there in the way of your doctor’s providing you care you need.
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How is your deductible and max out of pocket? You don’t count that? Lol I don’t run into too many people who say anything good about our healthcare scam system.
Paying for a service that most of the rest of the world decided should already be covered.
It’s getting paid from somewhere, by someone. Doctors aren’t just suddenly free because they have universal healthcare.
I didn’t say they would be. But to pretend American healthcare makes sense is beyond absurd. Workers are already taxed to fund Medicare/-aid (which we can’t access), then we’re also expected to pay private insurance premiums. The best part is that’s de minimis! All that gets you is a pass to get in the door.
Then you have to pay co-pays and coinsurance, and possibly your deductible. We pay SIGNIFICANTLY more than our peers in the wider world for no reason other than greed.
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I don’t think you know what that word means
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You do realized you still pay for your healthcare via taxes in those nations right?
Sure, although they pay far less and have better outcomes.
I live in the US and pay less than a lot of European nations so that’s not true.
That isn’t out of pocket expenses, healthcare is the largest expenditure in the federal budget so of course the per casita is going to be high for the wealthiest nation in the world.
Alrighty. But if you sort this by median income per capita, the US is pretty far down the list. 15th in fact.
The only wealthy ones are the insurance companies…
This thread itself has lot of people putting forth their shitty experience with American healthcare. Insurance denying to cover treatment on vague bullshit, not having coverage if you go to a clinic a block over, etc.
I guess I pay a similar amount as you; around £230 a month in National Insurance. According to XE that’s about $280.
And yeah, that’s not a bad amount to cover any medical needs I might have.
The difference is that, by and large, that’s all I pay. If I got hit by a car tomorrow, I wouldn’t get charged a penny for the paramedic, for the equipment they use to help me, for the ambulance to take me to hospital, for the doctors and nurses who patch me up, and for all the physio, medications and aftercare I’ll need.
I’ll pay ~£10 per prescription, but if I develop a chronic, life threatening condition, that fee will be waived. If I don’t, then I can pay a flat annual fee of £110 and receive as many prescriptions as I need.
Also, my National Insurance contributions (theoretically) ensure that when I reach retirement age I’ll be able to receive a state pension.
The NHS is something that I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep, and you guys in the US should be fighting for your own version of it.
i wonder how many people will live through their whole lives without ever needing to use the insurance they pay for anyway.
You pay more per week in case you have a medical emergency than I pay per year for literal medical emergencies. You pay more in a month for just having insurance than I paid for a 10 day hospital stay, completely uninsured.
Yeah I just pay like $36 a month or so and my copays are $35, or $75 if a specialist.
