How much do Americans actually pay for healthcare?
How much do Americans actually pay for healthcare?
Hey all, I'm British so I don't really know the ins and outs of the US healthcare system. Apologies for asking what is probably a rather simple question.
So like most of you, I see many posts and gofundmes about people having astronomically high medical bills. Most recently, someone having a $27k bill even after his death.
However, I have an American friend who is quick to point out that apparently nobody actually pays those bills. They're just some elaborate dance between insurance companies and hospitals. If you don't have insurance, the cost is lower or removed entirely. Supposedly.
So I'm just asking... How accurate is that? Consider someone without insurance, a minor physical ailment, a neurodivergent mind and no interest in fighting off harassing people for the rest of their life.
How much would such a person expect to pay, out of their own pocket, for things like check ups, x rays, meds, counselling and so on?
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I lived in the US until a few years ago. I take daily ADHD medication and took birth control for several years, but not always. Otherwise, I was pretty healthy and didn’t have much medical intervention, but I have bad teeth.
I got the most cost effective insurance plan for me based on that medical history available at roughly $240 per two-week pay period, with a $5,000 deductible. The medication I took cost about $300/month and I had to pay for monthly drs visits and urine tests, to make sure I wasn’t abusing it. I don’t remember how much those cost, but I generally spent about $11k a year.
As a healthy (if neurodivergent) person in my 20s.
If I hadn’t had insurance, it would have been much more expensive, which is nuts. I got a tooth pulled and an implant put in, which cost about $8k all told, of which $2k was covered.
When I was in my early twenties, I got a chemical burn on my eye which required lots of treatments in the emergency room which I tried to pay, but there were twenty different places billing me for it and I just lost track of it. I had no assets and a bad job and they went into collections, but never showed up on my credit report and I essentially faced no consequences for doing so, except for much increased stress. If I had tried to do that with the tooth, they wouldn’t have given me the implant without upfront payment. If my payment had bounced, I had a better job and more money than earlier, so they might have tried to garnish my wages or sue me for payment.
Just going to mention here that a lot of countries with universal medical care don't include dental care, the UK being one of them I think.
That’s absolutely true. I’m now in Germany, where that’s the case, but it’s still a hell of a lot cheaper than $8k.
Which is frankly bullshit. Your teeth are absolutely capable of killing you if infected. I get not doing regular cleanings (shiny white teeth is a bit of a weird american-ism) but dental care is fucking inportant.
Not to mention the whole thing about how
people need to be able to eat!!!
I completely agree. Unfortunately it's a holdover from the earliest days of medicine, doctors differentiating themselves and their schools from both the barber-dentist tradition and midwifery. Humankind would have benefitted if they had shared training, techniques and knowledge (with oversight and testing of course). Bad dental health leads to (and can be a sign of) a lot of systemic illnesses.