Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.

Water isn't like drugs and surgery at all.

Huh?

I don't know a single person who ENJOYS going to the doctor, or needing medical treatment.

What are you on about?

There are lots of people who get freaked out and go to the hospital for every little thing. We used to have a term for that: "hypochondriac." Now it's become socially acceptable, so you don't hear the term as much.

Everyone knows Americans pay the most for medical treatment, but the life expectancy is not that high. If you know your behavior isn't good for you, but you can't stop yourself, well, that's an addiction.

On the contrary, if the healthcare system in the US weren't such shit, more people would probably be going to primary care doctors and getting Preventative Care before it becomes an emergency, and requires a trip to the hospital.

But many people don't, because visiting a primary care / walk-in clinic / urgent care is expensive, so they ignore it, until it becomes un-ignorable. Now it's an ER visit.

That's pure speculation on your part. My stance is common sense: if it doesn't work, don't do it.

> Everyone knows Americans pay the most for medical treatment, but the life expectancy is not that high.

Sure.

> If you know your behavior isn't good for you

This doesn't follow. Our healthcare system might be worse than some but that does not imply it's bad for you. That same logic would imply getting punched in the face is good for you because it's better than getting shot.

> Our healthcare system might be worse than some but that does not imply it's bad for you.

Well, if you have that mindset, then you'll never achieve anything better, will you? It's not necessarily bad for us, so we'll just keep doing it.

It's like the people who vote for the same set of loser politicians every 4 years and then complain that nothing ever changes.

You're making a very good non-coherent argument, and I'd claim you're moving the goalposts, but you don't even have goalposts.

Nice one. You made me stop and think.

I was thinking about condensing my thoughts into a post, but I'll make one point on the issue of premiums. In the article, it says the cost of insuring a family of four is $25,000 a year. That sounds accurate to me.

I know from experience (being self-employed for a period of time and having to figure this all out myself) that if your family is healthy, you can replace all 4 full-term plans with 4 short-term plans and pay about $4,000 a year for the same coverage. The only difference, really, is that your insurance coverage ends after one year and you have to apply for it again. This used to be seen as risky, but with the ACA, someone will always be forced to insure you. So, it's not the same anymore.

That's not even all we could collectively do to solve this problem. Just imagine if all the healthy people in America just did that. I know, there aren't many healthy Americans left. And a lot of people have health insurance as part of their benefits package.

But many of those people are paying their dependents' insurance out of pocket. So, someone on a full-term plan could switch all his dependents to short-term and save about $5k per year per person. And it doesn't cause any noticeable difference to someone's coverage.

Imagine if only 1 million healthy Americans went from full-term to short-term. The health insurance industry would lose 5 billion dollars of income a year. That's not huge for a $500B industry, but it's not nothing. Corporate America sits up and starts paying attention to what's going on at ANY loss of revenue.

This is not insurance advice, but just thinking out loud. Verify everything yourself, but my point is that there's a lot everyday Americans could do to hurt these companies in their wallets. We just need to come together, share ideas, and trust ourselves and each other more than nameless, faceless companies.

Here's a goalpost for you: a healthy person should not spend more than $2,000 a year, total, on any health care related expenses. Even that number is ridiculous. But it's probably about half of what people are paying. If we all focused on that, and helped each other achieve that totally achievable goal, we'd change a lot about this rotten system.