I'm a software engineer, and I dealt with this multiple times a year until I joined a big corp. In all my years of startup life it was the norm to constantly battle the system and have several thousand dollar medical bills thrown at me all the time even though I had insurance. I don't actually talk about it a lot, because there's nobody to talk to who will actually fix the system, short of moving to another country. As I understand it, this is the state of "21st century life in the US".
At a big corp, things are different, insurances are shit scared of big corp HR ditching their policy so they pay for everything.
(Either that or understand your insurance better).
Back when I was a contractor I was on $850/month insurance and they paid for almost nothing. Deductible was $6K and even after that they paid for almost nothing.
Maybe $1600/month+ insurance would pay for something, but then it's questionable whether it's a good deal.
None of the marketplace plans covered the only couple of medical institutions in my area I trusted to give me a life-saving medical implant for a condition not well understood.
And yes, marketplace insurance is poor. I get paid a fraction of $500K and the deductible for the whole family is under $4K. Max out of pocket is about $5K, but we never hit it. I don't pay any premiums. If I were single, it would be much cheaper - I mostly pay for the dependents. Big companies negotiate good deals, and they'll often have employees who will act as your advocate for weird billing problems. Insurance companies don't want to upset a big client.
Sad fact of life in the US that one of the reasons people cling to soul sucking jobs is this - even when they have enough money to retire (but still too young for Medicare).
Despite what the news will tell you, most SW engineers don't deal with this. In over a decade of working, with lots of interactions with the medical system, not one of these has manifested for me nor for my friends.
> transportation isn't cheap. a rock hit the bottom of my car last month on the highway and it cost $700 to repair. tires wore out and that costs $1000. DMV charge me $600 a year just for the hell of it. insurance costs $200/month. other costs are upwards of $200/month just to use the damn thing. and then there's parking, energy costs, fastrak costs, ...
There's a whole country out there where you don't pay most of these fees. I pay a sixth of what you do to the DMV, and half what you pay for insurance (and I have more than the bare minimum). Repairs? Yeah, sometimes I have to pay a lot. But something on the order of $700 for a single repair is one of those "once every 3-4 years" things for me, for 2 cars.