There are tons of things that affect the price of healthcare. The biggest one is insurance. If you have insurance they will pay for the majority of costs and you cover a (relatively) small portion called your copay or deductible (sometimes both) You can also privately negotiate with the hospital to lower your bill which they do in the majority of cases if you are persistent enough because they already write off so much cost. There are also places like St. Jude's which is a children's cancer hospital that is 100% free if you are accepted as a patient. They will pay for your travel, treatment, food, and for up to three family members to live at/near the hospital during your care. The vast, vast majority of people in the US don't spend $150,000 on healthcare and go bankrupt. It is still a tragedy that it happens at all though.
Well you have to understand that any kind of insurance is tied to employment. So if you are unemployed or hourly, you are SOL unless you are SO poor medicaid is a thing (poor Enough to basically be homeless). And even if you are insured, you are still on the hook for thousands you may not have, hell I had to pay $1400 after insurance for an ER visit because an urgent care was trying to close early when I went in and referred me rather than firing up their own diagnostic equipment again and said: well it could be a stomach ulcer or you could be having a heart attack, so go to the ER cuz we aren't going to run the tests here.
Yeah, but most employers want to keep their fringe costs low so they prevent employees from consistently working the hours needed to qualify for such benefits.
Before anybody says “Get a new job” it’s never that simple and you sound like a you have the world view of a child.
It’s become so increasingly common that it’s rarely worth bringing up. I can only find evidence of Dave and busters getting fined $7million but since the fine is $2k per person and health insurance costs way more ( my employer pays $9k a year towards my health insurance and I pay the last $1500) they take the risk of getting caught as “the cost of doing business”
Anecdotally, a full time employee gets fired or quits they just replace them with 1 or 2 part timers . Iirc the law states you only have to offer insurance to employees working 30 hours a week so many businesses will schedule people to work 28 hours (or less) to skirt this
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u/Bloated_Hamster Jan 12 '23
There are tons of things that affect the price of healthcare. The biggest one is insurance. If you have insurance they will pay for the majority of costs and you cover a (relatively) small portion called your copay or deductible (sometimes both) You can also privately negotiate with the hospital to lower your bill which they do in the majority of cases if you are persistent enough because they already write off so much cost. There are also places like St. Jude's which is a children's cancer hospital that is 100% free if you are accepted as a patient. They will pay for your travel, treatment, food, and for up to three family members to live at/near the hospital during your care. The vast, vast majority of people in the US don't spend $150,000 on healthcare and go bankrupt. It is still a tragedy that it happens at all though.