I am not from the US. Had my close relative fight with cancer. If not for the government which sponsored it almost fully, excluding a couple of procedures like PET, it would cost our family a lot. Just for the scale: pial for one infusion of one out of three drugs would cost us $8k and my relative would’ve needed 16 infusions.

  • vivalapivo@lemmy.todayOP
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    11 hours ago

    max out of pocket

    That’s what I’ve been missing all this time.

    Bottom line is:

    If you have income above the poverty line, say $2k/mo, don’t pay the insurance fee for some reason (the income is from something shady like onlyfans or etsy), you don’t have a disability, and you’re younger than 65 - only then you can get million dollars bill.

    Otherwise, cancer treatment could cost you up to $15-30k and sometimes even be free.

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Generally speaking yes, some caveats where people still end up with more debt than they can handle is if you have a family insurance plan your max out of pocket usually doubles, so you can be looking at 2x the amounts I quoted.

      The other big one for a lot of health insurance in the United States the employer pays a percentage and the employee pays a percentage for it so generally speaking shittier jobs pay a lower percentage and have worse plans so a person making 30k/yr might have to pay $300/mo for kind of shitty health insurance and if they have the mindset of “I never get sick” that’s an easy expense to cut so they can end up with the uncovered medical expenses

      Then there is also if a person leaves a job and before they get a new job they are without insurance and you can pay the entire premiums yourself but those can easily be hundreds of dollars that if you don’t have an income can be rough

      Also companies don’t need to contribute to insurance unless you are full time so it’s a common practice that companies like Walmart will intentionally keep people part time so they don’t have to pay benefits and a person ends up working two jobs so they still make too much for Medicaid, don’t get insurance through either job, and are usually still trying to pinch Pennies to save money so shelling out the several hundred dollars a month doesn’t seem worth it

      Personally what I find to be the ironic scam of all of this is people in the U.S. generally pay for insurance directly out of their paycheck and so when they talk about their paycheck being so much smaller than their gross salary they always blame “taxes” when in reality a sizable percentage of their salary is going to health insurances, but they don’t want nationalized healthcare because it would raise their taxes more than it is. When in reality US citizens pay more money between health insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, copays, etc then the cost of health care in countries with “free” healthcare by 50-100% and have lifespans that are significantly shorter

      • vivalapivo@lemmy.todayOP
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        10 hours ago

        Yeah, thanks for the explanation. I think I have a better understanding of the US healthcare system.

        As for the people, they are just parroting the media, nothing new here.