• 0 Posts
  • 3 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 18th, 2024

help-circle
  • My 3 mile bike ride takes 2 minutes longer door to door than driving.

    As has been repeated a few hundred times in this thread already, the part that makes it takes so long is car centric infrastructure. If you live in suburbia where you have a population density of 1k/mi2 (400/km2) you will have to travel a much more significant distance than if you live in a place that has 9k/mi2 (3500/km2)

    Then with less car centric infrastructure the benefit of having parking right next to work starts to go away and the extra space can be used to shorten commutes as well


  • 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


  • So there is also an out of pocket maximum which is the most you’ll pay in a calendar year no matter how much your expenses are which vary by insurance plans but in my experience have generally been between 5-15k with 15k being for much cheaper insurance and 5k being for better insurance so if you have 1m in medical expenses and copay would be 200k it would instead be just that max out of pocket of approximately 10k, which while not great is much more manageable. The unfortunate thing is that is tied to the year so if you start treatment in November and finish treatment in March that 10k per calendar year turns into 20k since it was over the course of 2 years