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Joke's on them! I already opted out last year after the last price increases! They wanted almost $900/ month to insure my partner and I. We can barely afford to get by without paying a second rent just to see a doctor a few times a year.
Insurance better watch out.
Increasingly this is the decision people (especially the young) are making. So now you have less people paying into insurance. Raising the cost for those with it. So more people drop their insurance. But insurance execs and politicians are fine letting things snowball in the name of greed.
Sounds like cable cutting all over again.
the snowball is going to force government managed healthcare. I'm excited for it.
That is minimum 4 years down the line assumming that a democrat gets elected. And assuming that healthcare execs, pharmaceutical reps, and insurance ceos dont torpedo it into an ACA but worse situation. My guess is that its not going to force shit because republicans will fighr it tooth and nail, and democrats even wth a supermajority will water it down to nothing. Real government managed healthcare wil require a dismantling of the two party system.
If you are young and fairly healthy, look into high deductible plans. Those should be significantly cheaper but won't cover any routine health services at all. You'll pay out of pocket for those (possibly at a much lower cash rate depending on provider). Then plan will, however, cover you if something catastrophic happens which requires expensive care.
The high deductible options offered nowadays are way too high. If I have to pay $8k towards a deductible I'll just go to the ER and ignore the debt collectors for a few more years.. I'm in my thirties, so I won't be buying a house for at least another 20 years anyways, if ever. Credit does nothing for me.
If you go to a hospital and the hospital bills $100,000, let's consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You have a high deductible health insurance place with a $10,000 deductible. The health insurance company pays $90,000 and the hospital asks you to pay the rest. Hospital bills have a lot of wiggle room and all of it is negotiable. You tell them you're broke. In this case, the overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they'll do something like "Okay, pay us $50 a month for a year and we'll call it good", because they already got the vast majority of what they were asking for from the insurance company. They have already made most of their profit. It is totally not worth it for them to even send this to collections, let alone hire a lawyer to sue you.
Scenario 2: You have no coverage. Hospital asks you for $100,000. You tell them you're broke and will declare bankruptcy. They might offer you a plan like $200 a month for the next three years, because nobody else has paid them anything. And here's the thing: they have leverage over you, because they know that a bankruptcy lawyer is going to ask for a $10,000 retainer paid upfront. You can't just go up into your local courthouse and shout "I DECLARE BANKRUPCY!” in the style of The Office. Nope. You'll just get 25% of your pay cheque garnished for the next eight to ten years because you couldn't afford a bankruptcy lawyer to stop it. The hospital knows that they can juice $9,000 out of you or more, because you being broke also means you can't afford a lawyer.
Anyway, you do the maths. I don't know your financial situation and how much the insurance companies want to insure you. You make the right decision based on your situation. I'm just providing information. Maybe the maths nonetheless points you to Scenario 2 being a better bet. But it's not as clear cut as one might initially think, so at least give it some thought and punch in some numbers into a calculator. And if you already have, more power to you.
I have nothing worth taking except my life and freedom. I was born into poverty and, despite 18 years of constantly overworking myself, that hasn't and won't change. The systems in place are so stacked against me that I'd rather participate in them as little as possible. I have no idea how people with tougher circumstances than me are getting by in this shithole country. I had a friend a few years older than me, with the same financial situation, who had breast cancer. She couldn't afford to have it treated. It killed her. She was 28 at the time. If I get cancer, it'll likely be the same for me. Best case scenario, my partner and I get some kind of inheritance from his side and we migrate to a country that takes care of its people. Maybe the US will swing back to the left at some point, and we'll have socialized healthcare, but I'm not holding much hope for that.
You have a pay cheque, don't you? That's something that they would try to go for.
To be clear, I don't defend the broken system, but I am trying to see what you can do to make the best of the crummy situation that it is.
This is exactly the scenario that Obamacare was trying to avoid, and through hard work and greed, we made it inevitable anyway.
I agree with that. But I'm also trying to help the parent commenter make the best out of a cruddy system. I don't defend it. People have a tendency on Lemmy to downvote people who aren't sufficiently negative about something, purely because they think the terms used to condemn it weren't strong enough, and therefore I must actually be someone who supports it.