If you're "poor", insurance is actually cheap, because that's when you get public insurance. However, if you're just middle income, health care is a non-trivial portion of your income. One major health incident will bankrupt you and you're likely to become poor. But once you're poor, hey, you can get cheap health insurance.
The critical problem is that obtaining reasonable health insurance requires you to be employed full time at a large company. This must stop. Obamacare was a first step toward cutting the employer out of the picture.
When I became a salaried employee in the Bay area I went to an urgent care recommended by Cigna and my allergy problems were resolved inside of 15 minutes with a $20 copay.
Obamacare is anything but cheap when you are poor.
As far as cost controls/etc, set by something like a dutch auction within a given metro area, and then some bean counter will get to figure out if it's cost effective to ship people that are outside of metro areas in to them to provide non-urgent care.
I would love to pay $400 a month for health care for my entire family all inclusive in the US! Can you please state the name of your insurance company and your specific policy so I can get this too? My rate is over $20,000 a year right now so that would be a tremendous savings. Thank you so much!
My health alone is $2,100/month for a family of four. I suspect your employer is paying a large portion of your premiums as a benefit.
This is quite common in the US, and a significant portion of the problem, as people think they're getting great insurance "cheap". They're not - it's just being paid in a way that's not visible. As a result, any discussion of "it'd be cheap to implement national healthcare, it'd only cost $X" is met with "but I pay peanuts for mine now!"
In my case I do know. My employer pays $930 some a month. My rent used to be $860/month.
The other thing the happens is just because you have insurance doesn't mean that healthcare providers aren't trying to jack more money out of you. Any procedure/service will be up coded to increase your out of pocket share.
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/form-w-2-reporting-o...
Did my taxes and my family of four was well past the $30k mark for insurance, copays, dental, and optical this year.
Not only do employers pay for a portion of employee healthcare costs, they also get better coverage for less.
Why should I trust your figures over the article? Are you including the "employer contribution" toward your taxes and health care premiums?
I imagine you can still pay $1000+ out of pocket to have a baby in a US hospital, even if you have great insurance.
Also, the article talks "average", while I imagine US health costs are highly variable depending on whether you are young, old, smoker, non-smoker, fat, skinny, pre-existing conditions, etc...
Some people pay $1500 per month in health care. And some, $400.
I just got that bill, in fact, and we have about the lowest deductible insurance you can buy, at a cost of about $1500/month. It was still $6500.
> In Denmark, only health is covered, so for eye and dental many go out-of-country to get it cheap.
That kinda sucks for Denmark. In Austria, everything is included in the 7.5% that health insurance costs.
Health insurance typically only covers the minimum at the dentist, and almost nothing of what is considered "cosmetic" or would be good in the long-run (e.g. oral hygiene, braces). It gets expensive quite fast.
Depends on if the individual's state accepted Medicaid expansion funds from the federal government (states like Texas and Florida haven't) and whether the individual makes less than ~$16.5k/yr.
I wouldn't call either $0k/yr in North Carolina, or $17k/yr in New York, lower middle class. Neither of those incomes in those places would give an individual access to Medicaid.
Good luck finding a Medicaid provider.
Or that socialism is a bad thing?
The US is much cheaper for all health insurances, except if your poor. Obama tried to fix that, but made it worse and more expensive for everyone (socialism).