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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Please look around you a little more. My buddy separated his shoulder snowboarding in Tahoe. He had a full time (40 hours a week) job at the time, but it didn't provide healthcare.

He couldn't afford to go to hospital, so never did. I was visiting from Australia at the time and was utterly horrified, having no idea the US worked like that. Now years later his shoulder is still screwed.

Of course people in the US avoid going if at all possible, it's horrendously expensive, and medical bills are the number one cause for bankruptcy in the US [1]

In a stack of OECD countries (all the other ones?) nobody has ever gone bankrupt from medical bills, because that's impossible.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-415...

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Sorry, but is this a good example?

There are people that cannot afford insulin. THAT is a problem. But the fact that he took a risk, for fun, and suffered the consequences, rather than having everyone paying for it? That sounds a bit reasonable...

Note: important that the risk is voluntary, optional and recreational rather than professional. Why would the collective bear the costs, in those circumstances? Why is that fair?

Person doesn't have insurance and injured themselves doing a risky activity, and can't afford treatment. If it's really bad, why not use bankruptcy, I can't imagine this person has anything valuable given the history you described.

Or use physical therapy, it's cheap.

What is insurance for? To cover risk of something bad happening. The bigger the pool paying for it, the less impact to any one person to cover all the risk.

Now imagine that was scaled up to a whole country. That's New Zealand. Check out the Accident Compensation Corporation. All medical costs related to accidents are automatically covered!

But who pays the costs! Everyone, via levies. How much? $2000 on a $150K IT income.

But how do you control costs? Who is entitled? Who is at fault? Surprise! It's a no-fault accident insurance system that covers all accidents.

In exchange for that, we gave up our right to sue in accidents for medical damages. Why pay a lawyer when they're not required?

I guarantee the average US worker that makes 150k (not an avg salary) pays more then 2k in SSI taxes that cover Medicaid. They pay all over again for private healthcare, probably in the 6k range if they don't have kids.

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