You cannot get a better deal on health insurance on your own than through your employer. If you want to take a summer off the amount of money you would have to save up to pay for that is much higher. If you are thinking about changing jobs for more money you have to not only compare salaries, but also a complex benefit system that isn't really explained in the job offer.
If you want to see transparent pricing get the employer out. Buy your insurance directly from whoever you want (or maybe from the agent you like). Of course it will take years for things to change after this, don't expect things overnight.
Edit: as others have pointed out, it is the large companies who benefit at the expense of small companies and employees.
For smaller employers, it's better to just tell the employees to go to healthcare.gov and reimburse them for premiums they pay. Less paperwork, and employee gets to pay for health insurance with tax exemption.
And of course some lobbyist was able to put a stumbling block into the ACA: companies can't reimburse your ACA premiums (they can give you a raise but it's taxed).
It's only huge companies that want this system to remain.
This is completely wrong. The amount of money that employers have to pay in order to subsidize public insurance (which is the literal reason that prices are not transparent) is orders of magnitude more than what they can quantifiably get from you working that extra summer, or what have you.
In general a trip to the doctor and medicine is $10-20. I paid $500 for a 4 night stay in hospital (appendicitis)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Chronic-deficits-plague-Japa...
> the government decides the costs of all procedures and medicine
That's a simplification. There are rules for pricing. Drugs in Japan will typically be priced somewhere between EU pricing and US pricing because the PMDA benchmarks across different countries, so Japan drug prices can't be massively cheaper or something. Companies know that very well and on purpose do not let Japan get a first approval for any kind of major drug, as benchmarking vs EU/US will enable them to secure higher prices in Japan. There are whole teams working on optimizing the rollout of drugs worldwide just based on maximizing pricing strategies.
Plus, the article clearly mentions:
> The relatively low incomes of those covered by government insurance make it difficult to raise premiums
The ones who benefit the most from large healtchare payments have close to no income (retired people), so they can't bear any cost at all basically. This means massively increasing premiums for a minority of the population.
Per capita healthcare costs in Japan are still less than half of the costs of the US. Because of the age heavy demographics in Japan, that should be more difficult to handle than the US.
We recently did this for my spouse who had to have surgery that ended up not being covered by insurance due to it being classified as 'elective'. It was 100% NOT elective, and I decided to dig.
After almost a full year (and being sent to collections for non-payment as I refused to pay until I had an itemized bill) I received a bill that was actually itemized. The surgeon/staff coded the surgery as the wrong procedure.
But because there is never, ever a bill that lays out what you're paying for, I was never presented with an opportunity to question charges. Luckily I have a position that allows that much flexibility, but not everyone is that lucky.
The opportunity to question charges arises when you get your day in court. But, as you have discovered, the collection agency won't ever try to get a judgement in court because they full well know that the charges on the bill are bogus and the judge will throw the whole thing out if they pull up in front of one. That's how it works.
Just how calorie counts are required on menus in many states, it might seem that price lists might be legislated similarly.
Our main disagreements are about "who" pays. Or at least that's what all of our major political fights seem to be about. Its a great distraction, because it sucks up nearly all the air of public conversation.
As a result, no one is ever having that conversation about why we need someone else to pay in the first place. The whole system is setup so that the sticker price of everything is unreasonably expensive, such that an intermediary to "negotiate prices" has become mandatory. Almost regardless of who is actually footing the bill in the end.
The system is completely broken.
But you need to factor in your monthly costs into the equation.
If you never experience a severe illness or accident then you're paying $3,020 ($250/month?) a year to see a doctor once for a routine checkup, or ~30k for 10 years, or nearly ~100k for 30 years.
The total cost calculations that show the US system to be twice do include taxes spent on health care, naturally.
As always it's the implementation not the concept, the NHS has been a political football for decades, The left wing party (Labour) get in and increase funding to offset the damage the Right wing party did (the Conservatives) by underfunding, then they swap back and forth.
Even with all of it's problems it's a very efficient system at scale but it could be much better.
For what it's worth out of 600 odd MP's (our version of Congress people) I'd maybe piss on two or three if they where on fire, the rest can burn.
To reword your statement, "My sandcastle building is going great except every once in a while this jerk comes over and kicks over my sandcastle, I guess there's a problem with my sandcastle" and the correct answer is that the problem is the jerk.
We had a referendum on proportional representation vote and you should have seen the adverts from the against camp, it was depressingly expected though.
How we get to that point I'm not certain of.
But one hilarious thing in the US is a trend lately of people submitting ballot measures, those ballot measure passing, and then the conservative held government refusing to honor those ballot measures. I don't personally thing direct democracy is a good general solution, voters generally won't have the expertise to decide intelligently, but when an issue is prominent enough that a plebiscite is called going against that is incredibly undemocratic.
Discounts, bundling, rebates, or preferred pricing of any kind should be illegal in health care.
https://www.wellsfargo.com/credit-cards/propel/terms
Telecom I completely agree though. Some of the fake fees they charge (that are worded to look like taxes/regulatory) is almost criminal.
I'm talking about removing hidden fees being passed around behind closed doors.
Fees like what visa will charge your merchant and kick back to your bank.
What other fees am I paying for indirectly without my knowledge? If I could see them maybe I could shop around for a bank that doesn't shaft merchants leading to a healthier economy and more jobs, you know, actual trickle down.
From what I gather in the US issues are e.g. weird shit banks do when processing checks and other payments, e.g. reordering transactions to generate unneccessary overdraft fees.
In Germany we for example long had the problem that ATMs of banks not in your network (e.g. when using a Deutsche Bank ATM with a Sparkasse card) were not required to show the fees associated with withdrawing cash. IIRC it needed EU regulation to finally fix this.