As an American resident, I couldn't be more excited for Amazon to disrupt the reprehensible anti-customer practices endemic to the US healthcare system.
Recently, I had a runny nose and no fever and thought, "what the heck, let's get a COVID test", and found out they are $200+ here in Austin.
Your county isn't doing free COVID testing?!?! In my county in Maryland every day there are about 10 sites you can get free testing (though they are not all open all day, but at any given time between 7a-6p you can get tested at least one or two places). There are also private practices where you can pay extra to get the results back 1-2 days earlier.
I had a secondary exposure and my rapid test was $400. Thankfully I have really good insurance and didn't pay anything.
My alma mater has an endowment of multiple tens of billions of dollars and was forcing students to pay for COVID tests after having on-campus lectures.
>Thankfully I have really good insurance and didn't pay anything.
For the lolz.
You are paying for it, you just don't get an itemized bill. It comes at the cost of extremely high 'insurance'. And if you think you're employer just absorbs that cost, realize that the extra cost would be in your pocket as wages if it weren't going towards healthcare.
Yes, if you want to get pedantic, I pay $300 a month (pretax) for very good insurance that covers both me and my wife. Given that we both got tested, that $300 seems a bit cheaper than $800.
> And if you think you're employer just absorbs that cost, realize that the extra cost would be in your pocket as wages if it weren't going towards healthcare.
lolz. This is quite the assumption. Wages have been holding steady despite massive corporate tax breaks. Why? Because corporations pocket the saved money without passing the savings onto employees. If I didn't get health insurance, it's quite unlikely that the savings would be passed onto me in the form of wages.
And even if I was given the wages:
1.) Wages are taxable. My healthcare is pre-tax.
2.) There's absolutely no way I could get the healthcare I currently enjoy for $300 a month on the open market. The risk pool for my company (Amazon) is so large that it effectively subsidizes my insurance.
Why? We have prescriptions here and it's a service that needs disrupting. My Dad has a monthly prescription he has to pick up from Boots because no delivery service he has ever used has been reliable. The branch he goes to is 10 miles from his home because every other branch nearer to him has let him down badly in the past with missing items he has had to chase up for days afterwards.
We're talking about picking 6 labelled items from a shelf and putting them in a paper bag. How someone can get that wrong over and over again baffles me?
Recently, I had a runny nose and no fever and thought, "what the heck, let's get a COVID test", and found out they are $200+ here in Austin.