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Comment by coding123 | Hacker News Reader

You can count on the states that have an official number of infected people of about 100 to have about 10000. You can count on US states that have 0 cases for those to have about 1000. We've passed containment options when we didn't do anything about 2 months ago.

People just don't go to the doctors, especially with the news of how people are being treated on the boats.

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Deductible of several thousand per person in our household. Good ol’ HSA plan (our other options guaranteed higher spending than that every year on premiums). Bet your ass we’re not going to the hospital unless we absolutely have to. And we’re lucky enough to have insurance and the means to pay if we have to (though it’ll hurt a hell of a lot).

> Deductible of several thousand per person in our household

Call your insurer. Many are waiving testing and treatment, including for HDHPs, in respect of SARS-Covid-2.

Insurers are proven to live when you call them (source: personal experience in the past).

Lie you mean ?

Not sure why you're being downvoted because that's what they've been announcing. Whether they uphold their agreement is a different story but this what we're being told by the insurers.

I would be shocked if that turned out to be true. At best I’d expect some part of treatment very specific to COVID-19 to be free but everything else around it to be normal price. Insurance companies and hospital billing departments screw you and screw up constantly in the best of circumstances—no way I’m trusting them any more than I would a used car salesman.

> I would be shocked if that turned out to be true

It’s a call. Not that hard. My insurer, a major Californian one, confirmed affirmatively within minutes.

Don't just call, get it in writing if you're in the USA. At the very least record that call if it's legal to do so in your state, but that's problematic for other reasons.

When the hospital decides after the fact to bill you thousands of dollars you won't have much of a recourse besides telling your family members to ignore the calls from aggressive medical collection agencies at 3am.

I'm on a HSA plan with an absurd deductible. The crazy thing is that the HSA plan is still cheaper given that my family does not have any critical event in the next three years. HSA was a great idea (one of my employer had low premium + low deductible + good HSA account subsidy). But way too many employers and insurance company abuse it where people are afraid of using their insurance because of the out of pocket cost.

Is your deductible higher than what you can put into the HSA? I’m putting about $7k into my HSA each year, but my deductible is only about $3.5k. The first year sucked because we had to pay out of pocket until we had enough in the HSA to be reimbursed. But by the end of the year we had enough to pay off the next year’s deductible. Now I have enough in the HSA to pay a few years worth of deductibles. We typically burn through the deductible by March of each year, but we get it all back from the HSA and all of our medications and visits are incredibly cheap for the remainder of the year.

I figured there are probably a LOT of unreported cases in the US because most are not severe and never get diagnosed. But if that were true, we should see a small number of deaths all over the country rather than a few pockets of them.

I think you’re correct that the OP is overestimating somewhat. That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that not all deaths are recorded. You have to test for those too.

In places without testing there could be an uptick in unexplained pneumonia deaths. We don’t really have any overall stats on that. But this is fertile ground for an investigative journalist. Calling hospitals in places with little testing and seeing if they have anomalies.

Not going to the doctors (unless you are a person at risk like and elderly person) is the smart move anyways. Here in Austria the current reaction for a patient testing positive at a doctors office is to close it down for two weeks. The official guideline when you suspect you have the virus is to call a number and a doctor will visit you.

Is there anything that can really be done? Given a reasonable budget, how could the spread of corona be stopped?

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