One medical emergency and your credit will be ruined. Wait a seven years without contracting the debt collector and the debt becomes uncollectible. After three years roughly three quarters of the effect on your credit will evaporate. That's what actually happens beyond the hyperbolic political grandstanding.

Remember kids, if you get a bill that you can't possibly pay. Don't pay it. Let it go to collections and pay it for pennies on the dollar (another trick, tell them the most you can pay is $10 a month or something else low. Pay off that debt in 2075) or just wait for it to become uncollectible.

Where will you live? In my area you need good credit to get an apartment...

Credit affects your life in many ways, I’m not advocating a specific action, just pointing out that the advice above can have negative effects on your life.

This advice is extremely glib and more of a headache than you're is making it out to be. Sure, there's techniques for deal with this shit. It doesn't change the fact that that it's still a giant pile of shit to deal with, and it would just be much better if we as a collective society didn't allow one medical emergency to cause problems for you of this magnitude.

Also, if you're trying to be your own business and your credit is ruined, what do you think happens to that business? My guess? OP was right, and he has to end it all.

Generally nothing, the hospitals don't actually expect you to pay the bill they just want the tax write off they get when they send it to collections. Jeff Bezos might have to pay but if you are just some guy with a business that doesn't even generate enough money to pay for your own health insurance you will most likely be fine.

Do you owe the debt to American Express? It depends on the state in the US, they can sue you, and try to garnish wages and take assets that way. But some states have laws against things like wage garnishing, it also costs money to sue some one. So if $costToSue > $expectedDebtRecovery they aren't going to sue. They usually just sell the debt to a collections agency who just calls you relentlessly trying to get you to pay, and since the collection agency bought the debt so cheap, they aren't going to throw more costs to collect the money by suing. If they can get any money out of you just by calling, it's a win for them.

Source: Canadian, walked away from my student loan debt after injury, provincial loan was wiped clean federal loan had to be paid off. Student Visa wiped clean. To be clear I could not work and the bills kept getting harder and harder to pay. I was dying with stress and anxiety about bills. So I stopped paying them and bought food instead. I was young and not prepared for emergencies but it was clear I was sinking. I would like to also add this is NOT a great solution if you can avoid it. Responsible spending is. With the debt, for 7 years I could not get a credit card or take out a loan. If my car died I had to buy a new one right now out of pocket for work. It is not good. So though I had about 20000$ in provincial loans wiped it took me over a decade to pay off the rest of my debt. Today I am 100% debt free and even have a few dollars. The difference in stress levels I live day to day are huge I can not understate how much responsible spending with in your means can do for a person.

The people lauding the wonderful beautified “universal healthcare” (which, btw, they lied to you about never wanting to implement during pre-Obama care con job that made the Health sector rich and the middle class poorer) do t ever actually account all the costs when discussing it, and I will just assume you are doing the same from a point of ignorance, and not intentional deception.

Here is a representative example of a wonderful splendrous worker with universal healthcare in Europe.

1), as surveys here too show, for the same job, you’ll be making about 50-75% the salary of an American equivalent (see following points).

2) Your tax burden on that immensely lower income will be approaching 30% effective income tax (FYI, e.g., the 42% tax rat starts applying at €55,000, just for a reference point … and no, that is not a typo)

3) on that lower income and higher taxes amount, you then get to pay huge retirement taxes too, on the order of effectively approaching 20%, with heart wrenching and soul sucking outcomes when you see the “pension” people are given after a life of paying into an utterly incompetent and failed retirement system. For reference, think of paying into a retirement system at going on 20% of your income and then getting about 1/4 of your salary to live off in “retirement”. It’s sad and sick and immoral. If people had been able to simply invest their own money in a global fund, they would probably be swimming in money in retirement, but instead they were pillaged and plundered in order to give them a pittance in “retirement”. It’s really a morally bankrupted and depraved system.

4) so now that we’ve reduced your already lower income by around 50% from taxes and a con job retirement system, let’s talk about the health care system cost that will run you about €300 per month in employee costs every month just for a single person, not counting the employer contribution of another ~€900; again, for a single individual. And on top of that, you are also going to have copays to see the doctor (albeit about 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost in the USA, so you get to save $5-15), but you also get to go to a doctor for a prescription and a pharmacy to buy things like basic over the counter medications like ibuprofen .… that comes in blister packs of 20 you get “for free”(see tax burden and health insurance costs above for reference of level of “freeness”). Again, no, those are not typos or errors, they are very much representative examples.

4) gasoline is taxed at 100%, in most European countries or more, with talk of increasing it. And no, again, that is not a typo. For reference, in the USA gasoline is taxed at around the 20-25% range. The reason I mention that, is because it’s not only a taxation on mobility, it again sucks the disposable income of the lower income people dry.

And none of that even goes into the fact that medical care is determined by the insurance that pulls typical insurance things where when it’s time to pay out all the sudden the medical care is deemed not necessary.

The saddest thing about the health care cost debate is that it seems to be driven by a con job to trick people into a trap that will enslave them to authoritarian control even more without any benefits from it, if not only more detrimental effects like Obamacare that only served to drive up costs and then peg them at new levels that made health insurance companies and the medical sector richer, while Medicare fraud and pull pushing has run amok.

I actually find it curious that especially this community would not realize that the ideal system is not a centralized monolith running on a con job and no backups, but a highly competitive decentralized system forced to be transparent and accountable. But I guess whatever is driving the centralization of power and control among the tech tyrant FAANGs, seems to have also latched onto people’s minds here maybe.

Please excuse any errors because English is not my first language

Since we're ticking off items, Australia has both a public pension scheme and compulsory private retirement savings (superannuation). Taxes on petrol are higher than the US but lower than Europe.

I think you've been sucked in by the talking points, mate.

You may claim "is much cheaper", but reality is that you just don't know and are not being told the full cost of what you are being forced to pay for.

I don't know what you think you are explaining to me, the USA also has a public and private retirement planning system, and again, AUS is not exactly as bad off as Europe; but reality is that you don't see the freight train that is barreling down on you. The thing that makes the USA, AUS, and EU very very difficult to compare for even the supposed experts, is that there are so many modulating variables. Not only are they variables, but they qualitatively modulate things. For an example, you think your system works great in AUS and you have lower taxes and a public health care system that works ... what you don't consider, intentionally ignore, or are propagandized not to even be able to take in; are things like the fact that you don't have huge populations that drain the life, energy, focus, and money out of the USA by the billions. For example an estimate of the cost of various existing welfare programs in the USA ... not ones where you even get something at overpriced and inefficient rates like universal healthcare ... costs the American tax payer approaching the amount of the whole GDP of all of Australia. Think about that, the money equivalent of work, energy, and focus of the whole Australian economy, what every single man, woman, and child does in the economy; goes towards welfare programs to support people that are drains on society. They are even largely not only not contributors to society, spending a whole life of being a net overwhelming negative contributor, but increasingly they are not even American citizens that are draining the country.

The point is, you can sit there and chide big mean America for not providing health care, while also not having any idea what you pay for that, nor the overwhelming cost it would be to take care of everyone in the USA, in addition to the fact that you take for granted that the US tax payer funds the protection that keeps China from a full on invasion and even allows you to engage in free trade at the American tax payer's expense. And all that while you spit in American's face. Reality is that none of this math makes any sense or adds up in any manner when all the full accounting is done. Do you want to pay for the health care pampering of someone that chose to get morbidly obese while you lives healthy and saved your money instead of buying food with it? Reality is that if the USA were to adopt some universal healthcare system, it would bankrupt the USA and trigger a global economic collapse as all the fools don't realize just how dependent they are on the USA, and then they would also find themselves without the massive military that keeps them safe from others more than willing to conquer them when given the chance. Choices have consequences, my friend, and I do not think you have the ability to recognize the precarious situation the world is in as types like you keep sawing at the branch you are sitting on.

Of course this exact same thought process can be applied to other american 'quirks'. e.g. mass shootings and gun control.

But due to Medicare etc, it's not that big of a deal whether a worker is a contractor or employee.

What is the reason insurance providers don't want to insure contractors?

But whatever, it did suck to pay ~$1K per month for health insurance.

If you’re billing at $300/hr and working when and how you want, it actually seems immensely disingenuous to try to associate with the sympathies for people stuck in the gig economy con job the tech tyrants have been imposing on society as a kind of excuse why you couldn’t manage to fill your consultancy pipeline.

I also guarantee he could have gotten health insurance, he just did not feel comfortable paying the roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per month it would have cost because his business pipeline was not full of work consistently.

People don’t realize just how much health care costs, regardless of whether it’s American employees who don’t realize the employers contribution is about 4-5 time what they pay monthly, or the worshiped and beatified “universal healthcare” that is “free” in Europe where massive taxes are paid to augment the also massive individual monthly cost taken out of people’s paychecks.

The American system costs way more for comparable care, precisely because of our insane system. Every single dollar or hour spent on medical billing issues and dealing with insurance and arguing over who pays is total deadweight loss.

I don't think it's abnormal not to want to pay those rates.

$1,000+ a month is absolutely insane for health insurance and at $2,000 a month you're now beyond the cost of most rent for something that you'll hopefully never need to use for decades, but more importantly you have no options. It's either pay massive fees (+ copays, etc.) due to no real competition or go without insurance. For the last few years no insurance also came with paying thousands upon thousands of dollars a year in fines too.

I am an uninsured freelance worker too for reference. But that plan definitely wouldn't work out if I had a family to insure, and then the costs are astronomical to the point where you would be in debt and have no savings unless you were absolutely crushing it.

Worth noting that American per capita spending on healthcare is much higher compared to European countries despite a lower life expectancy.

Before Obamacare and without the ability to bargain as a large scale employer, my insurance options were limited to "defined benefit" plans where the maximum they'd pay out in an emergency was limited to about what you paid in in about a year or so. Effectively no emergency coverage, just incidental stuff.

Another fun feature: preexisting conditions. For which insurers will pay $0. It's pretty horrible, and one state where I lived passed a law so the pregnancy could not be considered a preexisting condition for insurance purposes. Which meant that if you were pregnant you were denied coverage at all. By everyone. Without exception.

Perhaps your state had a $1k/mo option for insurance, mine did not. Even at $5k/mo (if I had it) plans would not cover an emergency. None of the plans available to the self-employed would.

I do agree without reservation that linking healthcare to employment is crippling for independent contractors. As I understand it, the setup allows employers to deduct substantial costs from taxable income. So basically governments are subsidizing the obscene profitability of health insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, and some provider sectors.

Back in the late 90s, I was able to get ~affordable health insurance through AFL-CIO SBWA Local 125. But that service went down in flames, so I ended up paying ~$1K per person. As I recall, I could deduct 50% of medical expenses, but it was still the largest expense after mortgage and taxes.

And if it had been $5K per month, I couldn't have managed it.

What?

Can't you buy personal health insurance with decent coverage for on the order of $500/month? And that's for plans with low deductables. $6000/yr for personal health insurance for an individual seems perfectly reasonable.

I'm concerned because I'm planning on eventually pursuing my own startup. If I can't get health insurance, this becomes extremely risky and untenable. If your post is correct, how does self-employment even work?

My understanding is that individuals can buy affordable personal health insurance. Am I wrong?

For those of us lucky enough to be in good health, the "Gig economy" as-described would be just fine.

It's a common refrain that only people with health problems need health care, but that's just not true. Risk has a price. That's why health care and life insurance for healthy people is not free. Good health just makes it easier to pretend that risk isn't there.

Tying health care to employment is a historical accident long overdue for change.

Ironically, it came about because of wage freezes imposed by the government during WW2. Employers had to find something to offer to attract workers, and employer-paid insurance did the trick.

The trap, though, was that employer paid insurance was paid with pre-tax dollars, while if you bought it yourself you'd pay in post-tax dollars, making it far more expensive.

This, 100%. It wouldn't solve everything, but it'd be a huge positive step to roll back tax incentives that encourage this.

Health insurance’s main alleged draw is that shit happens when you least expect it, and you can avoid the massive costs when the unexpected happens (accidents, cancer, botulism, whatever). Unfortunately, someone in America found out you can charge monthly fees for health insurance while still making the person pay massive amounts themselves. Just promise they’ll pay a slightly less massive amount.

Only if they are rich enough to post a rather large bond.

Problem: You need a full-time job at a company to get benefits such as healthcare.

Californian solution: Reclassify as many as possible as full-time workers.

Problem: USA immigration laws are horribly inflexible.

Californian solution: Make it illegal to go after illegal immigrants.

I don't think that these passive-aggressive fixes are good for USA's democracy. Either we need to split up the country into more manageable chunks and make moving between states as hard as moving between EU countries or we need to accept the intent of federal laws. Otherwise we will just end up in an ever escalating war of dumb bills to counteract the other sides dumb bills.

It depends on the country of origin, but for many, moving between EU countries is about as moving between states is now. There's some bureaucracy to deal with, but it's not like moving between states in the US is hassle free. Most US states require immigrants from other states get a local drivers license and local car registration, which requires multiple proofs of residence. Don't forget the nightmare of having to deal with two states' taxes (where applicable).

Europeans generally refer to "being on benefits" as unemployment allowance, and no, you cannot move from a poor European country to a rich one to get a higher standard of living unless you can work, or can be supported by someone who works. Certain kinds of social programs in the US have this property as well.

Americans often refer to medical care/insurance as a "benefit", which might be confusing here, but yes you absolutely can (as a European) move to another country without a job and still get medical care in the area you have just moved to.

As for immigration, the main issue that is that many California families are a mix of American citizens and illegal aliens that have lived here for decades

Contractors don't pay into unemployment, but they're also not eligible to receive unemployment benefits.

You just hit the nail on the head. The real problem is that California is grossly under-represented in government, thanks to the founding fathers and gerrymandering. We have to slap together these hacks because otherwise we would wait centuries to get any real change out of the Fed.

As for "USA's democracy", screw the USA and its' democracy. As a Californian, I care about California's democracy, not the GOP's federalist plutocracy.

Republikans look at California as a rich man to mug who won't fight back. These laws are how we fight back. The USA needs us, we don't need them.

The fact is a state with 38 million people and a GDP equivalent to 20% of the nation should have more representation than moscow mitch's welfare state of kentucky.

The unfairly low representation of large states in the Senate is a huge issue, but it's not what "gerrymandering" means.

If we actually followed the spirit and intentions of the founding fathers, then California would already be grossly under-represented. Add to that the way the GOP rigs the elections via gerry-mandering and . voter suppression, and Californians are treated like slaves, not citizens.

They have all forgotten the battle cry of the republic, "NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION".

#calexit

When the GOP owns the senate, as they do, they attack California's sovereignty at every opportunity. We are net-givers to the federal budget, whereas moscow mitch is a welfare queen whose state is the biggest net-begger.

Our wealth, our culture, our environment are all under attack by a nation of right-wing christian terrorists who resent that us Californian libtards have created the wealthiest, most successful and productive society the world has ever known .. while all they do is shoot guns.

#calexit

  - unionization and industry bargaining to get decent wages and conditions
  - quality social welfare systems (including universal healthcare) so that people aren't afraid of poverty if they get fired/quit/change jobs

How many people would like to do a startup but don't because they have no food or shelter? We don't really care because the costs of those things are manageable.

The problem isn't that the government isn't paying for it. The problem is that it costs way too much.

You can't be serious. There is a housing affordability crisis throughout the first world.

Housing and food are rights. They should indeed be funded by government, through comprehensive social welfare, and in the case of housing, publicly owned housing.

Only in the most dense urban areas. Not "throughout the first world."

> Housing and food are rights. They should indeed be funded by government, through comprehensive social welfare, and in the case of housing, publicly owned housing.

We do provide public housing and food for those who can't afford it, but the people who utilize it often aren't the ones creating startups.

Are there too many regulations? Insurance is just a business, it seems to me.

Most of the policies are high-deductible, which means you’ll end up paying for the “scratches and sniffles” yourself but have a per-year maximum-out-of-pocket that can be planned for.

It’s not perfect but it at least provides an option whereas before if you had any non-trivial pre-existing condition you couldn’t find any insurance at all.

It seems healthcare.gov is not good enough yet? I don't think classifying government institutions as startups is really correct, though. They have infinite money supply and no requirement to be profitable.

Additionally, mass exodus of drivers from Uber/Lyft will compel those companies to increase rates

That health care should be decoupled from employment.