this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
1031 points (99.3% liked)
Not The Onion
21266 readers
2125 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The family should get back every penny they've paid to that insurance company.
What the fuck are they paying them for?
Not to have a tax penalty. Also the privilege to be told no. There are people literally dying to have insurance that will also tell them no
It's also designed to keep people dependent on their employers. You land a salaries position at a company that provides one of the few decent healthcare plans in the US, and suddenly you'll put up with a lot of shit to keep that job...
It's cheaper to pay cash than use insurance. But for the last decade in my state it's required to have it you get penalized.
My plan is for kiaser HMO. And its 36k/yr.
The cash price for a baby, 3 day stay everything included is 20k. A doctor's visit is $50 dollars. A xray is $150. And say i wanted weight loss drugs like ozemic every month for $700/month. I could have a child, be medicated by experimental weight loss drugs, get an xray every month, and have a personal relationship with my doctor they month and it would still be cheaper than paying for insurance.
That's why they require it, your premium helps pay for other people who can't pay. But if you are paying for it, you are getting screwed hard.
Until you need surgery and it's 400k. For clarity insurance is a scam. Not going without it in today's climate is taking a massive risk, though
Total scam. Shouldn't exist. I hate it.
American style health insurance is a scam. I pay around 600 euros a month in Germany, for me and two kids, and there's no such thing as "copay". Delivering a baby costed us about 8 euros in parking fees. This is a private company offering insurance, there's no single payer in Germany. Other European and Asian countries do have single payer, with similar costs (the contribution is then a tax instead of insurance payment). It's the American "five yachts per CEO" model that causes problems.
Yes, for most people, in most years. But the cost of health care tends to be very, very unevenly distributed. A person might see medical bills of less than $1000 per year for 20 years and then get a single $1,000,000 year. So at that point, it's an annualized cost of $50,000 per year, even if most years it's about $1,000. Some estimates are that 10-30% of all medical spending in the US is in the last year of life.
Many believe that because of this distribution, health insurance should primarily be a catastrophic care model where most people pay a premium that doesn't cover anything for the first few thousand, then covers a percentage of the cost up to the out of pocket maximum of like $15,000 or so for a family, but does cover everything after that. For a typical household, being able to predict annual healthcare expenses for the entire year is very useful.
And personally, I'm pretty sympathetic to this catastrophic care model as a short term transition to an all payer model that looks like Switzerland's system (private insurance, private providers, mandatory coverage, strict price controls, and subsidies for anyone who can't afford the normal premiums).
If you could predict everything perfectly then that’s fine. What if instead of a normal delivery, you needed a week in the NICU? Then that $20k quickly becomes $100k.
And it would still be cheaper for me with cash. Over 20 years, that insurance will cost be 700k.
In that time, I've had 2 kids, 4 bad sicknesses that required medical visits, 4 xrays, and MRI, antibiotics, my kid needed a leg cast, and my wife had p.depression after one kid.
I would be out ahead 500k if i paid cash vs insurance. That a house.
Again, in America, until literally anything happens. I've seen 7 figure bills hit ridiculously quick.
I know, that's why we find it acceptable to force people to pay into for profit insurance so CEO billionaires can have whatever they want. I can't believe Democrats love this system.