| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago |
| So I happen to be in Costa Rica for the month. Just like every other 1st world country, it has managed to have universal health care that is better and cheaper without private insurance. Even if you do get private insurance for quicker access, it’s still much cheaper than the US. I just spoke to someone who flew down here to save $30K on dental work. The problem isn’t the ACA, it’s the ass backwards American health care system. I was at a meetup of American ex-pats here and half of them said they established residency here to join CAJA - the health care system |
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| ▲ | nostrebored 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| ACA enshrined the worst parts of the American healthcare system for years to come. It is a politicized victory that is the best solution for no American citizens. Places I’ve been with fully privatized healthcare or single payer are both significantly better for consumers. Insurance companies have raised prices to restore profit, were briefly a mandatory expense, and will exist for years to come. |
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| ▲ | ipsento606 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > ACA enshrined the worst parts of the American healthcare system for years to come before the ACA, insurers could deny coverage for pre-existing conditions people have forgotten how bad things used to be | | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | twoodfin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why is that inherently bad? Should I be able to buy fire insurance on pre-existing embers? | | |
| ▲ | throw0101c 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why is that inherently bad? Should I be able to buy fire insurance on pre-existing embers? What if someone gets Type 1 diabetes as a child so they can no longer get insurance because of that "pre-existing" condition: if they get cancer for unrelated reasons they should just be saddled with medical debt? Or because of your Type 1 you can't get coverage, and you get t-boned in your car by a drunk driver. Certainly it sounds 'unfair' that someone who smokes (a personal choice) gets similar cancer coverage for someone who does not smoke. But it also means that if your ((great-)grand-)mother had cancer, and you get it through no fault/choice of your own (i.e. genetics), you can also get coverage. There are many circumstances in which you suffer through no fault of your own, and universal health coverage is present in many societies because it was decided to protect those people—even if it allows some 'free-riding' by others making poor choices. People make all sorts of crazy decisions to prevent the "wrong" people from getting what they "don't deserve": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness | |
| ▲ | ajkjk 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it's bad for the person, obviously. The point of society-wide policies is not to maximize economic efficiency; they're supposed to making society a good place to live. Of course if you only look at them under an economic lens they're going to seem bad. Economically the best policy would be to kill all the sick people. | |
| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you live long enough, you will have a pre existing condition. The way it was suppose to work with the original mandate is that everyone had to be insured either through their employee or the exchange. So you couldn’t just buy insurance when you were sick. The Supreme Court struck that down. If you lost your job, before the ACA, you could not get health insurance outside of working for someone and having group insurance at any cost. But you do realize that the entire idea of not being able to get insurance because of pre-existing conditions is completely unique to the US? Costa Rica for instance (where I am right now for a month and half) allows anyone to become a resident as long as you have guaranteed income of around $2000 a month or you deposit $60K into a local bank account and they arrange monthly disbursements and you pay 15% of your stated income to CAJA. Healthcare is both better and more affordable here. The same is true for Panama. Why can’t the US figure this out? | |
| ▲ | ChadNauseam 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It interacts badly with insurance being offered as workplace benefit. If you quit or lose your job, you'd lose your health insurance. And any plan you signed up for after that would then treat you as "pre-existing embers" and expect you to pay accordingly. The bundling of health insurance with workplace seems like the healthcare original sin to me. Obama couldn't change that, so the ACA redesigned the system to work with it. Despite being called insurance, health insurance is no longer really viewed or designed to be any kind of insurance. Instead, it's supposed to be Netflix for healthcare. You pay a flat rate, and then get unlimited healthcare. Obviously, the issue with this is that if you don't need healthcare you can just not sign up for the subscription. So the ACA tried to solve this by requiring everyone to sign up. Once everyone is required to sign up, it's not right to discriminate against preexisting conditions. It may not be an especially good system, but it is coherent. | | |
| ▲ | mjevans 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The US is allergic to taxes. Maybe it's a marketing thing. Benefits paid for by society. Maybe a department of Return on Investment. See what those taxes pay for. Contrast to buying private versions of the services at the same SLA or better. | | |
| ▲ | twodave 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s more that the US is more like a collection of 50 little countries, and it’s supposed to be hard to accomplish much at a federal level. That separation has eroded a bit in the last 50 years but it’s still very much a part of our political ideology. |
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| ▲ | CGMthrowaway 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We traded the cruelty of Exclusion for the cruelty of Extraction. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Insurance companies have raised prices to restore profit, were briefly a mandatory expense, and will exist for years to come. Why do their stocks underperform so badly? https://imgur.com/S8bNSM2 | | |
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| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Costa Rica is a beautiful country. But it is in no way “first world”. It has no military, and is effectively dependent of the US and in best cases neighboring countries. It has excellent weather and soil which account for its fruits exports… and outside of some niche industry, is mostly reliant on tourism which means importing money. I love that country and have been many times. But if it were god forbid wiped off the face of the earth, it would be sad and annoying at best. Costa Rica has “free healthcare” / healcare from taxes because it has 5 million people, about 1/2 of New Jersey. This isn’t some mechanism that the US just refuses to use. It’s a matter of scale. You either don’t know and should remain silent on the topic, or do know it and lack the honor to not state it. |
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| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 a minute ago | parent [-] | | Costa Rica purposefully got rid of its military so it could provide services. It didn’t feel a need to fund three unnecessary wars in two years. Guess which other country has universal healthcare - China. > This isn’t some mechanism that the US just refuses to use. It’s a matter of scale. You either don’t know and should remain silent on the topic, or do know it and lack the honor to not state it. China does have a military… Maybe you should take your own advice. Every other country in the world seems to have figured this out. |
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