That is what pushed me to socialized healthcare private insurers can get fucked.
Every US-based friend or family member of mine has at least one horror story about a surprise bill, a Kafkaesque nightmare of denials and prior auths, being unable to afford their medications or doctor visits, unrealistically low annual visit limits (Depressed? No more than 12 visits per year to a therapist should cure that!), “copay accumulators”, and on and on. The podcast An Arm And A Leg[0] offers a disturbingly wide variety of stories of this bullshit and all the things you have to learn just to protect yourself from getting completely screwed in America’s privatised health care system.
It’s endless, and it’s exhausting, and it’s even more exhausting when folks like the OP show up to make baseless claims that government-run care is somehow going to be like going to the DMV because they’ve swallowed this “government is the problem” bullshit. I’m not going to sit here and say governments are infallible, or that Medicare is perfect, because they aren’t and it isn’t. But do you know which insurance plans in the US have the highest patient satisfaction ratings? The government-run ones[1]!
[0] https://armandalegshow.com/
[1] https://www.insure.com/health-insurance/health-insurance-sat...
My personal experience with Original Medicare + Medigap has essentially been this:
Step 1. Need some health service. Step 2. Go get the health service. Step 3. There is no step 3, unless the provider fucks up and tries to bill the Medigap insurer as the primary insurer—which is a problem caused by the existence of private primary insurers, not Medicare.
And with private insurers, this:
Step 1. Need some health service. Step 2. Check if the provider is in-network. Step 3. Check if the facility is in-network. Step 4. Check if the service is covered by the insurance. Step 5. Submit a prior authorisation or else the insurer won’t pay anything at all. Step 6. Get denied for some asinine technicality. Step 7. Appeal and submit more documentation until they finally capitulate. (Also, you’re doing this while very sick.) Step 8. Triple-check with the facility that they are only going to use in-network doctors for things like anaesthesiology. Step 9. Go get the health service. Step 10. Get a half-dozen gigantic bills in the mail.
There are certainly issues with Medicare, but I can’t think of any that aren’t the result of for-profit insurers or government abolitionists doing everything in their power to make the system intentionally terrible.
[0] As mentioned in the article, Original Medicare is parts A & B. Part C—Medicare “Advantage”—is the government hand-out to private insurers.