As a British citizen, this is so disturbing to me.
Recently, I had a runny nose and no fever and thought, "what the heck, let's get a COVID test", and found out they are $200+ here in Austin.
My alma mater has an endowment of multiple tens of billions of dollars and was forcing students to pay for COVID tests after having on-campus lectures.
For the lolz.
You are paying for it, you just don't get an itemized bill. It comes at the cost of extremely high 'insurance'. And if you think you're employer just absorbs that cost, realize that the extra cost would be in your pocket as wages if it weren't going towards healthcare.
> And if you think you're employer just absorbs that cost, realize that the extra cost would be in your pocket as wages if it weren't going towards healthcare.
lolz. This is quite the assumption. Wages have been holding steady despite massive corporate tax breaks. Why? Because corporations pocket the saved money without passing the savings onto employees. If I didn't get health insurance, it's quite unlikely that the savings would be passed onto me in the form of wages.
And even if I was given the wages:
1.) Wages are taxable. My healthcare is pre-tax.
2.) There's absolutely no way I could get the healthcare I currently enjoy for $300 a month on the open market. The risk pool for my company (Amazon) is so large that it effectively subsidizes my insurance.
Edit to remove snarky tone.
We're talking about picking 6 labelled items from a shelf and putting them in a paper bag. How someone can get that wrong over and over again baffles me?