[myth2018]

> Like a third-world country: in America, you're better off being either totally penniless or a billionaire. If you don't have a balance sheet of $5 megabucks, your life will be miserable.

I live in a "third-world" country. My family and I have insurance and only use private hospitals -- the capitalist portion of the system. Never had as bad an incident as the ones you guys are reporting here. Just some minor annoyances.

Not even the crappiest insurance companies do stuff like that, and they get terminated by the regulatory body if they start to mess up consistently.

Although I don't use it directly, I'm overall well-informed about the realities of the public health system. It's bad, but not even close to what I've seen posted here. One can even obtain overly expensive meds for rare diseases -- it requires some legal effort, but it eventually works.

Then I'd say that, when it comes to health systems, the USA is definitely way worse than some third-world countries -- and one of the main reasons I declined an invitation to work and live in there.

[seanmcdirmid]

When I was living in China working for Microsoft, our company provided insurance had a cap on claims paid ($100k), so while everything was cheap enough via the private system, I wondered if I was screwed if I ever got cancer or something really bad.

[dheera]

Yeah that doesn't sound like insurance to me at all.

[TheNewsIsHere]

It used to be common here in the US too, to have a cap on the amount an insurance policy would pay out.

My first “adult”/non-parental healthcare insurance policy had a yearly maximum and a lifetime maximum. This was pre-Affordable Care Act.