This stupid system that everyone hates has been like this for decades
This stupid system that everyone hates has been like this for decades
193 comments
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Just imagine living in a first world country where they provide free Netflix instead of maintaining an insanely large military.
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As an American, I'd rather die a preventable death then share free healthcare with someone I don't think deserves it! /s
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This point is overdone, but Americans spend more than other developed countries on healthcare, so it's not even an austerity thing.
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But then we wouldn't be able to murder a bunch of random Venezualans or lose wars that we started against overwhelmingly inferior opponents.
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It's not either/or. I think even if we joined all the other modern countries in providing universal healthcare for all our citizens, we'd still be spending more on our bloated, unaudited military than the next countries combined, but feel free to fact check that.
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excuse me it is audited regularly, just they fail every time.
edit: for anyone wondering, that's worse.
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Just imagine living in a first world country
Don't be smug about it. American insurance companies will eventually also come to your country.
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Maybe, maybe not. Our right wing idiots at least seem to value their own health and wellness enough to not approve of dismantling healthcare.
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Americans are amazing. Their healthcare system is literally killing them and ruining their families, and they keep talking about how bad "socialism" is...
The amount of bullshit this people buy is incredible.
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TBF a shitload of us know how socialized health care works. We want it.
There’s a massive, massive industry that is working very hard to make sure that it doesn’t happen.
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I work in healthcare. I feel like more and more people are wanting some sort of universal healthcare in the last few years, even if they are conservative, even if they'll vote against it, and even if the term "universal healthcare" will have them up in arms. But the concept itself? They're all for it, they complain that healthcare is too expensive and insurance companies aren't covering things and the system needs to change. They're getting there. It's taking them getting fucked over for it to happen and most of us may be dead of completely preventable causes first, but they just might get there.
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10 years ago, we almost had medicare for all as a public healthcare option. We were soooo close. But congress fucked it up necause they were lobbied by ins companies who knew everyone with a brain would flock to the public option.
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10 years ago, we almost had medicare for all as a public healthcare option.
The ACA was 15 years ago, and it wasn't even remotely close to Medicare for all. It was a halfassed Heritage Foundation policy that wouldn't cover everyone before just enough members of the Democratic caucus killed the public option, which was the intent from the very start.
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Living amongst these people is a baffling and frustrating experience.
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Their systems are killing them, their cops are killing them, their guns are killing them, their politicians are on record saying they hate them, their religious leaders are clearly stealing from them while they abuse their children, they hate traffic but refuse to do anything about including keeping cars but using roundabouts, and the propaganda that they claim is corrupting their minds is so pathetic that even a toddler should be able to see past it like it’s made of crystal-clear glass.
The reason I hate the US is because they have zero excuses and still fuck things up in so many obvious ways while anyone with more than a few braincells screams at them to please just stop chugging rat poison and all they can say is “but it’s different here, we aren’t Europe” as if that’s any kind of excuse.
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You are consuming far too much of the exact same mainstream media narrative that got us into this mess. All you're really telling me is that you are from a country Putin is not interested in, or your own friends and neighbors would be going batshit crazy too.
And before you excuse yourself thinking you'd never personally do that, that you are just way too smart for propaganda to ever be swayed by it, given your own propensity for unambiguously consuming media narratives and attaching your personal emotions to whatever caricatures of reality you've been shown, like you've just demonstrated in your comment, you'd probably be first in line to fall for the right-wing foreign-funded propaganda we've been flooded with for decades now.
EDITED a comma
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I didn’t build this fucking hellscape. I was born into it and I’m doing my best. Unless all the boomers and billionaires die off, we are trapped like this.
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Hey, some of us Americans just elected democratic socialists as our mayors.
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Stupidity is highly infectious
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I'm confused as to who you think made this post. You figure it's a French dude?
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Christ on a stick. Universal healthcare has nothing to do with socialism. Government programs that serve the public are part of the government’s core purpose in the first place.
It is remarkable how many people on this platform champion “socialism” when what they actually mean is social democracy. The difference is substantial.
Socialism does not work. It has never worked. No nation has prospered under socialism, and none will as long as scarcity remains.
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and the rest of the economy is heading in this direction soon. Rent seeking needs to be outlawed
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Universal healthcare is so hard that only 32 of the 33 highly developed countries in the world do it.
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Probably be 32/32 in the near future at the rate they're going.
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True that.
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How about when the website explicitly says your subscription covers Stranger Things, but you watch Stranger Things, and they then bill you $80.
Then you follow the steps to dispute it on their website. And they say they didn't make any mistakes. Then you do the follow-up appeal via snail-mail and they say that there's still nothing wrong.
(My experience with UHC and a cholesterol test)
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Took two appeals and 7 months but I finally got UHC to cover a test. The final successful action was a screenshot from the plan brochure that showed that they needed to cover it…
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In Taiwan, I pay for Universal Healthcare because I own a business. 5800nt(185usd) every 2 months for a familyof 4. It would be 3000nt(100usd)for 2 months if it's just myself.
The copay is 10usd for everything. Fever? Food poisoning? Chemotherapy? All the same cost. This includes all the medications and all incidental costs.
If you worked for a Taiwan company, you don't have to pay the 5800nt. But the copay is the same.
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in Spain , if only one out of x people in their family works, all the rest of the family members are insured for universal healthcare, as long as they are legal residents or citizens of course.
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Taiwan sounds amazing!
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My entire mindset of Healthcare had to change when I moved here. Previously in America, when I got a fever or a rash or a major allergy, I would see if its worth it to go to a clinic and sit for a few hours with other sick people and pay 75USD for them to tell me to go to a drug store and eat some Tylenol.
Now, I go into the clinic downstairs even if I have a cold. 10USD and they gave me a week's worth of meds. It's normal to go back to the doctor 2 days after if your condition worsens or if you just had a question.
I have yearly check ups and my doctor told me I needed to do a colonoscopy. If I opted for staying awake during it, its 10USD. But I elected to be put to sleep. It was 310usd.
Come visit us on your next vacation! The people here are very polite and pretty happy.
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So this sucks but you can avoid this with a simple trick. Call your insurance company first with the CPT codes for what you need done and where you plan to get it done. Your doctors office can give you the codes. They aren’t a trade secret or anything. Get diagnoses codes too if you can. Have the insurance company run the codes for you before you go. This does a couple things:
- You verify everyone involved is in network (be wary of anesthesiologists)
- You are getting a quote on a recorded line. The end price won’t be exact (especially is if the claim involves a hospital, fuck them, go to smaller providers whenever you can)
- if you get sticker shock anyway, you can call the insurance company back on that same recorded line and say the word “misquote”. This triggers an investigation that can strengthen your appeal.
- You now have evidence you can file internally with a quality of care/quality of service complaint if the provider did something shady with the billing, or with your state’s department of insurance if your insurance company is being removed.
Ideally, we would have single payer insurance, but we instead have a government that pays itself to make private enterprise do its job, then the shareholders in that private enterprise make sure nothing ever gets changed. -sigh-
In the mean time, if you really want to fuck them over, consider switching to health insurance company that does not have shareholders. In many states, they are legally mandated to refund any profit they make over a certain percentage at the end of the year and without shareholders, it’s harder to hide the money, which puts much more pressure on them to spend it on patient care.
United Health Care want you to believe their way is the only way to do this. They are wrong. A shareholder-free insurer still isn’t perfect but the pressures are different without the parasites.
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The fact you have to jump through these hoops at all IS FUCKING STUPID AND ISNT HOW IT SHOULD WORK.
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Agreed. But the fact is there is a lot of money in paying for medical expenses that keep going higher and not a lot of money going to the pot that pays it out. Single payer would address all of that instantly but the rich would be unhappy so we basically have to pay a survival tax to insurance companies every month.
I hate it here.
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It's like they've made the system so convoluted that you have to be an underwriter to receive services.
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There are those of us in n this industry that want that changed but we don’t have as much power as the bigger companies do so the best we can do is play by their rules. :(
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Any tips on finding an insurance company in your state that doesn't have shareholders? A big part of the insurance issue is that you have to practically be an industry insider to navigate... Anything in insurance, really.
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A shareholder-free insurer still isn’t perfect but the pressures are different without the parasites.
This is the first time I see this solution mentioned. It doesn't seem to be known much. Why would a single payer insurance lower costs further?
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I hear you. How does one pirate health insurance?
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Sail the seven seas to medical tourism
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Given how highly adaptable Americans are I am very surprised to not seeing more of you trying to make a life for yourself in Europe. A plane ticket to any eu country is far cheaper than an ambulance ride to er...
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I've seen a lot of Americans in my life.
Most of them are not adaptable.
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There was a movie about this called John Q.
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It's much worse because you can choose not to watch Netflix but you don't have much choice if you are sick.
It's more like receiving a bill for songs you hear on the radio in the grocery store, on the bus, in other people's cars passing by. You didn't ask for the benefit, could not really negotiate it, but it was useful to you when you got it. You could maybe avoid it by not leaving your house.
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It's not stupid, it's nefarious. Free Luigi!
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Fuck the American healthcare system and fuck Netflix
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After recently apartment hunting, I have a (slightly tangential) gripe to add on here.
When I was getting my income verification (to prove I could afford the proposed rent), it went off gross income - what you make before taxes and so-called “benefits” are taken out. The hundreds I pay each month for the “benefit” of being insured make a significant difference between what I make and what I take home. Do I make 3x a given rent? Well technically, by gross income, I do. But my net income is where that rent payment comes from, so the chunk of my take-home going toward rent is absolutely higher than 1/3 of the net income I can actually use.
I have no choice but to pay for this “benefit.” Notice I keep using quotation marks. That’s because I think the term is bullshit. I think a work-sponsored benefit should be something work provides. Yeah, maybe they got a “deal” to offer insurance to employees for lower than it’d cost to buy for ourselves, but come on. If work really wanted to call it a “benefit,” they should pay us more so the numbers even out on our take-home. We’re forced into these situations, yet employers have the nerve to use a term that implies they’re offering some special bonus to us.
Okay, enough ranting for now. No, wait - prescriptions! That’s another health-related cost that isn’t deducted, that I still have to pay for, despite having insurance.
The screws keep tightening around us workers and there’s no escape. I really hope Mamdani sparks inspiration across the country, because this shit is untenable.
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https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
Basically, stuff that used to be cheap has been turned into “markets” and now the entire middle class is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
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In my 50s, I pay $25/week for private health insurance, that covers 100%, non urgent surgery in weeks, gourmet food etc. If I didn't pay for private insurance it would be terrible - I might have to wait months for elected surgery, and the food would not be gourmet. It would still be 100% free though. I live in a first world country though, not USA.
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The problem with US citizens and their bullshit world views are....it takes other countries 6+ months for surgeries (which I know isn't true), but most, well most Republicans, in the US think you'll be waiting 6 months for life saving surgeries and you die waiting for them overseas.
The stupid ass media and insurance lobby has prompt this up for decades. Republicans believe anything out of their propaganda circles. It's sad af.
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Its stupid because you still have the choice to get private healthcare if you prefer. So you can either wait for the public capacity, or pay your own way out of pocket / through insurance like in the states.
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The other thing they gloss over is that it takes time here too. Unless you're going to the ER, you're often waiting months for an appointment.
I had to cancel a follow-up with my primary care doctor in September, and the next available time was this coming Monday.
A few years back, I needed a spinal injection to control my sciatica, my insurance company denied my pre-authorization, and I had to fight it. I eventually won 52 days after the initial request for the procedure, but they said I had to have the procedure within 60 days of the initial request. So the pre-auth expired and I had to go through the whole thing again. I spent nearly 4 months in so much pain I couldn't put on pants some days trying to get that fucking injection.
And to add to the fun, the injection started wearing off in the last week or so, so I'm gonna have to do the whole thing again.
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And then having to send emails back and forth for months talking to several people, taking days off work and spending hours on the phone for clearance to watch stranger things and having it be denied because of some obscure reason that is going to take you several more days off work to try to get clearance to watch the show again
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And if you don't watch Stranger Things, you die.
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Yep because you got fired for missing too much work and lost your Netflix. This was Netflix’s plan the entire time
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All this while being sick like a dog.
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I have been painfully aware of how expensive and convoluted this system in the USA is since childhood. Growing up in a household that hovered right around the poverty line meant we didn't qualify for the free stuff but also could not afford to actually go to the doctor, so outside of emergencies, we didn't. Friends at school would talk about going to the doctor for a sore throat or ear infection to get antibiotics or leave school early for a "physical" and that was all such a foreign concept to me.
But as everyone here is probably already aware and heard, it's bad bad bad.
As luck would have it (bad luck is still a type of luck after all), I had a major health incident earlier this year. I had insurance, not even anywhere near the worst mind you, and it costs me around $10,000 USD a year.
The $1,000 ambulance ride was not covered. The ambulance company is out of network.
The $500 ER doctor, who I did not ever see or speak to, was not covered. He, too, was out of network.
The 2 ibuprofen I was given cost $40. They were not covered by insurance because it is considered non-essential and I did not get pre-approval. Also, my partner had to buy a drink from the vending machine to wash the pills down.
My overall out of pocket cost was over $3,000. Tough pill to swallow considering I'm unemployed. The bills didn't even start coming until about 2 months after and took 5 months until I saw the last of them (I think & I hope). The ambulance company sent a bill, the doctor sent a bill, the hospital sent a bill, but then each little thing that happened at the hospital was a separate bill -- one from radiology, one from the pharmacy, two different doctors, etc. One incident involving one emergency room visit was at least 8 or 9 separate bills, maybe more. And this doesn't even include the follow-up care & costs.
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Besides the vending machine drinks everything else would've been free pretty much anywhere else.
If you go to any hospital with no insurance here and just ask for a couple of ibuprofen they'll just give them to you for free, the whole pack costs 3 bucks.
I once saw a bill online from someone who needed an MRI and CT scan after an accident and the guy might as well have bought his own MRI and took it home for what they charged him.
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Everything else is indeed free here in Canada except for the ambulance. That costs something like $100 per ride. Yes, we complain about it.
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The $1,000 ambulance ride was not covered. The ambulance company is out of network.
My elderly mom had to take an ambulance to the hospital a few years ago ($2800 -- I don't know where you are that ambulance rides cost only a grand). It turns out the ambulance that showed up and transported her wasn't the "official" ambulance service of the hospital she got taken to. So months later she got another bill for $2800 from the official ambulance service. She was going to pay it, too, until I intervened and said fuck no. They called and said they would send it to collections and I had a fun time yelling at them. They never did.
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Call the hospitals billing department and explain that your can't afford the bill. They will do what they can to work with you and may even be able to lower your bill.
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You forgot that if you don't have a good job you are deemed not worthy of netflix and have to pay more atevery single step listed.
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He got me at "Imagine paying for Netflix"
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Maybe we should try voting harder for representatives that are owned by the corrupt insurance companies and their shareholders
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Maybe we should vote against them in the kabuki primaries.
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What amazes me is Americans doing this to themselves. Literally acting against their own best interests, putting their lives and wellbeing in the hands of companies only concerned about profit.
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But hey, my doctor gets to brag about the multiple properties he owns while he barely pays attention to what I'm talking to him about. It's a great system for doctors.
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I don't know if that's the doctor, but definitely the CEO of the insurance company
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Little bit of column a, lot of column B
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American health insurance? That's not how it works in other countries
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That last one doesn't happen any more. It's called Surprise Medical Billing. Used to be that some providers would be out of network (thus requiring a separate bill) but now the law is that if an encounter is in network, the whole bill is in network.
I'm too lazy to do hyphens right now
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Not specifically because they were out of network, but I definitely will get billed separately by "contractors" when going to an urgent care clinic. They had a separate contractor for radiology examinations or some shit. And I've definitely gotten bills for nursing, or supplies, or any kind of random shit that wasn't technically covered by the original bill.
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The medical community needs to come up with a better word than encounter. "Encountering" one's doctor makes it sound like you should be filling a police report.
Also it results in billing codes like "sucked into jet engine subsequent encounter."
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Imagine paying for Netflix.
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oh no Netflix is getting ideas
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when this used to happen in the late 90’s early 00’s I would pay one, dispute the others and then ignore the calls. I visited one hospital, I get one bill. The rest are spam.
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And then imagine having to pay another actor who wasn't even in the movie, just because he came by to visit a buddy on the set one day.
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I stopped paying for health insurance years ago, no way I can afford it now. I just get it through my state system.
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Thankfully my Insurflix covers that.
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The country needs more diversity. Please visit us first and bring your culture.
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Virtually all of our politicians love it.
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Last time I had a surgery, I wrote "by participating in this surgery, all participants confirm they are covered under bcbs, and agree to waiver payment if not" right below the surgery site.
The doctor got a kick out of it, says apparently I 'got' one of his aides, who saw it, said his coverage was lapsed, and ask if a patient could do that. The doctor said he made him stand in the corner for 30 mins while they did my shoulder repair.
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I dont get it. In what way netfix related to health insurance?
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In the US healthcare system, sometimes you'll end up seeing a doctor that isn't in your insurance network. You have no way of knowing this until after you've seen the doctor, usually in an emergency or because they're a specialist. Then because they're not covered by your insurance, you get a surprise massive bill.
The insurance is Netflix's subscription, the specialist is the unsigned actor, and the bill is the bill.
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......it's not. Hence the imagine part. With US medical insurance you pay a monthly fee, then you pay more for a hospital visit, and then if a doctor's out of network there's more fees.
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The OP basically is saying: Monthly health insurance premiums == monthly subscription fees.
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Insurance in general is a subscription for a range of protections against certain events if they happen. That itself isn't the problem. It's the many companies setting different subscription prices and rules, and then having or finding loopholes in the rules to say "oops, sorry, can't help you there". For health It's also where some of them have deals with companies to give benefits for the company to use as a retention tool for employees.
Now we (talking US) could take the parts of both for health insurance and widen the pool of people to everyone, while also having regulation over a single type of insurance that would be able to cover the worse situations because it can spread the cost over the larger pool. This would also have a subscription, but one that would be lower for everyone and even waived for those at the lowest income.
However such a single payer insurance threatens the industry of health insurance as well as pharma, and guess who has lots of lobbyists in Congress to protect their interest.
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Replace "netflix" with "health care" and re-read the post. Th point is it's stupid to pay for something 3 times over but thats how (American) health care is.
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It's not, it's an analogy.
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Netflix is becoming an HMO.
Sounds crazy, but hey I wouldn't have believed my online bookstore would be delivering my psych meds 20 years ago either.
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Didn't get read many stories as a child, did you?
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193 comments