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As someone who grew up with the NHS and after living in the states for 6 years with only a weird travel insurance (in case of a accident/emergency) I finally have health insurance.
It;s works very differently here.
In the UK for instance, if you get ill, it's all covered. No out of pocket costs apart form maybe a small flat fee for aftercare medicine/prescriptions.
In the UK, your priorized by what is wrong with you. SO for instance, my grandad needed a knee replacement. They deemed it as non-critical and was given the choice to wait 8 months on the NHS, or go private pay for it himself and have it a week later. Same Dr. Same facility.
Over here, there's no priority system for thsoe with insurance. You need it done, it gets done but the costs can be insane.
I've got one mate over here that said the wrong thing to a girl while waiting in line for food at a cinco de mayo street party and woke up in hospital 6 months later to a $1.4m bill. His health insurance paid for most but he was still $80k in debt.
The way it now works with the ACA (Obamacare) is that you buy insurance, which usually has a total out of pocket annual limit (the total figure you can be charged in a year for any combined medicare) say $6000, but then usually a set deductable (say $1000) and then a co-pay amount which is often something about 30%.
So if you had an accident and it cost $10k, the first $1000 is out of pocket for you. You pay that.
Then of the next $9k you pay 30% which is $2700. So you've just paid $3700 for a $10,000 medical bill.
If you then had another $10k accident, you would only pay $2300 because you would have already hit your $6k OOP max. And then anything after that is free after you pay the deductible.
insurance plans get more expensive based on the lower deductible and lower OOP total. Usually there's a co-pay for doctors in network so they are capped at the tier set in your plan (around $40 for the plan I'm describing).
If you have no insurance, there are many local and state run facilities that offer free healtcare but it's usually emergency or for more serious things. You basically have to pay if you get flu and need to see a dr for antibiotics and if you can;t pay then you don't get to a see a dr.
Many larger hospitals (like Cedars Sinai here in LA) are run as Non profits but it's a bit of a joke as they make billions a year. But if you happen to get taken there with an accident and you're uninsured, they will first bill you something ridiculous, then comes a lengthy negotiation spanning several months and in some cases they will write the debt off as part of the NPO mandate (basically using money from paying patients to subsidize those who can't pay).
The worst situation in some ways to be in, is those with a small income that don't quality for the charity care providers, but don't have enough to pay for insurance.
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