Premiums for family health insurance at work jump to nearly $24,000

Was in a notable car accident, not the worst, but definitely not the best. Was advised to start PT immediately on discharge from hospital.

Every PT within 30 miles of me had a 3-6 month wait, when they were accepting new clients whatsoever.

Yeah I end up going to urgent care for just about everything, because my doctor is months out.

It’s not that simple: Americans aren’t unusually fat because everyone set out to get that way, but because we have unhealthy lifestyles (sedentary driving is the primary travel mode, we live in car-centric exercise-discouraging housing, our jobs tend to be sedentary but high-stress / long hours, etc.) and heavily subsidize low-quality food, and we price healthcare so much higher than the rest of the world that many people are discouraged from preventative treatment. If you fix any combination of those, obesity rates will go down but you’d have to do some care analysis to say how much of the healthcare expenditure reductions were due to lifestyle improvements rather than weight loss.

...because the FDA has stopped (been underfunded and politically interfered with) protecting our food supply from overuse of fillers, sugar, and other less healthy ingredients.

Cheap packaged food is very bad for you, and not everyone has the ability to purchase fresh stuff and cook it.

Me too, definitely can stand to lose a few pounds.

But I've also worked a good portion of my career in healthcare IT (claims benefit management, EHR), as well as a paramedic, seeing first hand the suboptimal care in ERs, hospitals, and SNFs (skilled nursing facilities). I have many physician and other HCP friends. SNFs regularly ship "annoying" residents to ERs because the staff deem them to be too high maintenance, resulting in a $2,000 bill each way for the ambulance, $3,000+ for the ER... and may do this multiple times a week.

I also grew up in Australia, and while that healthcare system certainly wasn't perfect, we spend far more here for similar outcomes.

My other passionate cause is end of life care - roughly, we spend more in the last year of someone's life on medical care keeping them alive, sometimes with horrendous quality of life (and often for family's benefit, not the patient) than we do in the previous ten years of their life, and we spend more in that ten years than we spend on the rest of their life. Forget "death panels", the more we allow death with dignity, or just better counseling for families that it's okay to let someone go, the better.