[wincy]

You just get the care anyway and get a bill later. It’s all pretty weird.

My wife got a medical bill for $100k after being hospitalized with a life threatening illness years ago called and told them she’d send them $6,000. They said fine and considered it paid in full. The whole system is really bizarre.

My uncle has cancer and no insurance and is on Medicare so all his costs are covered.

My daughter is disabled and is also on Medicare, which is a weird mix of private and public where Medicare pays her primary insurance deductible so if she gets a surgery any surgery or doctors visits we might need after that in the year are going to be free.

I was unemployed when my disabled daughter was born so it didn’t cost us a dime, if I’d been employed it would have cost at least several thousand dollars. I started a job a week later but that didn’t retroactively change the cost owed.

When my disabled daughter was in the NICU for six months while a recruiting firm was technically my employer, she ruined their health insurance plan by racking up a million dollars in fees because they only had 60 or so employees, so the cost was extreme and their health insurance renewal rates were more expensive for a worse plan. I left the plan and used a Health Insurance marketplace plan instead which was cheaper and better than what their organization was offering for the following year.

[rightbyte]

> she ruined their health insurance plan by racking up a million dollars in fees because they only had 60 or so employees

That is really bad. The gov or insurance providers (whoever is responsible) are essentially discouraging employing people with sick family members.

[lotsofpulp]

There was a lot of uproar from middle and upper middle class people when the original healthcare reform proposals in 2009 involved getting rid of all employer sponsored health plans.

Many leaders at that time did want to dump everyone into one insurance market so all healthy people subsidized all sick people, but there was tons of politics blowback from people who already had access to good healthcare who would see their costs rise because until then, they only had to share costs between healthy, employed workers.

Even today, you will read people lamenting how the ACA increased their health insurance premiums. Nevermind that it enabled millions more to actually get healthcare, so obviously the money was going to have to come from somewhere.