Yes! As a twenty something single I was shocked that people saw paying $200 out of pocket each month as a privilege that comes with working. Clearly, for me it was a pure waste because I used exactly zero dollars worth of health care myself. Of course, people with infants absolutely need it. I had a coworker who had basically the same story as Jimmy Kimmel (newborn with heart defect). I can't imagine how much quality care would cost if he didn't have health insurance through work. I mean at some point there were apparently dozens of specialists involved with the case... I'm sure each of them are billed at hundreds of dollars each hour.
I just want to say that at the end of the day there is no solution other than reducing the cost: be it healthcare or education or retirement...
I also skipped getting health insurance in my 20s, which I deeply regretted when I needed unexpected emergency surgery to remove a diseased organ.
The hospital that did it was religiously affiliated and knocked a huge amount off my total hospital stay, but I still paid a lot out of pocket.
What's worse is, until the ACA came along, that bout of uninsured surgery made me uninsurable from then on--I had "pre-existing condition". The ACA has made it possible for me to actually buy health insurance at all again.
Of course, I'm still hoping the Medicare for All movement starts gaining steam...
Until you have a catastrophic health issue like say total kidney failure at 18 which happed to some one I know or you need a transplant I dread to think what my recent kidney transplant would costs in the USA as opposed to the UK
> not getting healthcare as a 20-something is popular, but incredibly shortsighted.
My idea is that it is not something that you should have to think about. I mean I understand it is a difficult topic because you have these outliers that can totally destroy your life if you have a baby with a malfunctioning heart or whatever but it comes back to the question of what we think is fair. I sincerely believe that healthcare is too expensive. The problem is that nobody who is in a position to cut costs has the incentive to do so.
I mean I hear all these complaints about medicare from providers like oh there are restrictions on what you can bill and what you can't and I am just thinking "good" because otherwise the doctor will put every single patient who comes in with a stomach ache through an MRI without using any of her judgment. I mean it looks badly on her if one out of a thousand patients turns out to have something she didn't catch but it doesn't hurt her at all for all those 999 useless MRI and the cost of those. The hospital is happy because they already have the machine and the technician who is there so is drawing salary so they have an incentive to maximize the use of the machine and the technician.
I am hopeful for medicare for all but we should remember that this is not the end of the problem. There are no silver bullets. As a society, we have to constantly make difficult choices and I for one support "death panels" which to me means that certain cases where the cost is too great AND the outcome is not good enough can and should get denied.
> where the cost is too great AND the outcome is not good enough can and should get denied.
I'm not completely clear on the point you're trying to make, but this is how things work in socialised healthcare. Not everything is paid for - instead the money that is available is spent on those that return the best value-for-money balanced against not being unfair on an individual level. The question of whether to MRI everyone with tummy pain is translatable into a clinical question and can be tested in clinical studies.
In the UK we work on using a QALY - or quality-adjusted life-year to help with these sorts of decisions. They are used on boards in NICE (for general health-provisioning guidance) and the cancer drugs fund [1] which aims to give quick guidance on the fast-developing and expensive field of anti-cancer therapies.
Sure there are no silver bullets, but issues you bring up are being tackled to a relatively sophisticated degree in other countries.
I just want to say that at the end of the day there is no solution other than reducing the cost: be it healthcare or education or retirement...