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What is this thread? Since I got chronically ill my insurance has paid my salary for a year and is now paying into unemployment and pension for my wife, who's caring for me. And besides that they're still paying for all our medical expenses despite me not paying into them anymore.
Yeah, I had to fight for them to pay for a transport. But overall they definitely are offering a service I am greatly benefitting from.
The problem is greatly unequal access to healthcare. I'm glad your insurance is doing well for you, but there are many out there who are struggling to pay for expensive family insurance with high deductibles that still leave them in medical debt.
I'm also currently in a situation where I'd like to find a new job, but I have some expensive medication ($750 a month for one of them) and I am worried about losing my insurance/not being able to afford the premium while I wait for benefits to kick in at a new job. I also have absolutely no way of knowing if another employer's plan will cover my medication or if my current group of providers will be in network. All this added stress, and yet I'm lucky to work in a field where almost every employer offers health insurance.
Ideally, there would be universal safety nets to provide the services you're benefiting from to all Americans. It's not even like we're saving money by relying on private insurance, as the US spends way more per capita on Healthcare for average results, at best.
So I'm glad that your insurance is taking care of you, truly I am. But spare a thought for the thousands of Americans out there who are struggling to survive under the same system.
Not sure if you are in the USA or Germany based on your URL but The general idea is that a private company should not have to hold the cards for our fate, and our health treatment. That's what you are clearly missing. If you get chronically ill in some of the better parts of Europe, you won't have any medical or financial consequences of that. Ambulance is don't cost much of anything directly, hospital stays don't cost you much. In the USA you cannot say the same. Going to the hospital for some major illness like cancer or emergency surgery could cost you anywhere from $15,000 to $200,000. Look up the cost of having a baby at a hospital especially when there are complications. It's unbelievable.
The idea is that you should pay into a system that works for everyone, namely the government and taxes, and they help you out in return once you have a hardship at a low or no cost because you have been paying into it. This is not how insurance works. In most cases, you pay stupid amounts of money into insurance, and once the new year rolls around, you have lost your entire deductible and you're out of pocket is completely reset. You have severe limitations on your FSA or health savings accounts so you can't save enough money. Literally not allowed for you to save and stockpile lots of money for covering healthcare. You have to pay into this stupid for-profit company that doesn't give a damn about you and will never lift a finger to help you. Sometimes people are lucky and benefit from the insurance. Those situations are extremely rare, and situations in which people are financially ruined by insurance and healthcare are far more common.
I'm glad that the system in place has worked for you currently. But that does not mean it works for everyone, and that's something you need to understand. Just because something works for you doesn't mean it's a great system.
I'm truly glad that it's helping someone; however, for every one of you there are a hundred people denied important procedures because insurance has decided its opinion is more important than the doctor's.
An easily available example off the top of my head is Styropyro's most recent video where he might have cancer but Insurance has denied his brain scan.
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Disclaimer: I think the current U.S healthcare system is hilariously bad and should be heavily reformed.
Insurance is not a bad thing, and there is a clear product involved in it. To demonstrate, you can go to a doctor in the U.S and pay in cash for the treatment. As I've understood it, you can even negotiate lower prices than the list prices if you are paying in cash. Still, it's probably going to be expensive to the point of potential financial ruin.
This is the product that insurance offers in any domain it operates - buying your way out of risks you cannot accept. Fundamentally, the concept is sound, albeit very poorly implemented in the case of U.S healthcare.
It's basically just a bunch of people pooling their money together and having that pool of money pay in the case of an adverse event.
One of the primary alternatives to the mess that is U.S healthcare today is in fact another form of insurance - it's just that enrollment would be mandatory and as such the risk spreading would be as uniform as possible, along with subsidies for people carrying higher amounts of risk. That's fundamentally what universal healthcare is in other countries.
If you squint your eyes just enough, insurance is like gambling... You are betting that something is going to happen to you, the insurance company is betting against that. The insurance company can improve their chances by adding conditions to that something.
That's the part that makes the US system insane.
In countries with a public health care system, the goal of the patients and the doctors is the same. Everybody's goal is to prevent diseases and sickness, and to treat it when it isn't prevented. The administrators just estimate how much funding is needed to achieve that goal.
In the US system, the patients are trying to prevent and treat their sicknesses and diseases. The administrators are trying to find ways to avoid paying for any treatments, and the doctors make more money if they can find a way to bill more things.
And, what's especially insane is that healthcare really isn't a normal market like other things. If you're buying a truck, you can shop around, haggle with salespeople, etc. If you're hit by a truck, you're not going to be comparison-shopping emergency rooms.
It's way worse than gambling. When you win a jackpot there are laws that require you to get paid out.
Insurance companies can just say no and fight you in court until you die because it's cheaper for them to pay some lawyers than for your treatment.