Ask HN: How do you mitigate healthcare wiping out all your hard work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you mitigate healthcare wiping out all your hard work?

2 pointssergiotapia13 comments

I'm worry that when I hit 50 I get very ill with some bullshit like cancer and I have to sell my home, and liquidate all my savings to survive it.

What are you doing to mitigate this risk?

I would probably 86 myself before putting my family through that. Imagine all that strife and hard work and long hours, for what?

I don't know just planning ahead.

Should I move to a country with socialized healthcare? Will the USA ever change in this regard?

Tax me, but don't fleece me when I get sick as well and force me to buy expensive insurance.

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The risk mitigation is insurance. Yes, in the USA it is expensive and a pain (and it varies a lot by geographic area.) But since the ACA went into effect, you CAN obtain insurance if you are sick, and it will be subsidized if your income drops below a certain threshold. It isn't like the pre-ACA days where you often could not get insurance for any price if you were sick and/or unemployed. That is the situation you are worried about, and it has been mitigated to a large extent if you keep your insurance coverage up to date, before you can get the USA's socialized health care, which is just for those over 65.

Moving to another country may have other health benefits (life expectancy is better for all income levels in the EU, for instance) but overall income vs. expenses may not change much - it sometimes just feels worse in the US because staying insured is more DIY. Salaries can be quite a bit higher in the US, which may more than offset the difference (of course depends on the situation...)

This may be useless information to others but I eat healthy, get some exercise, eat some anti-tumor foods like cruciferous vegetables, keep stress levels down and hope that I buy myself enough time until a magic pill or injection comes out that tricks the body into doing a better job of hunting down cancer. Overall I don't worry about it as that also causes stress contributing to a self fulfilling condition. Eating healthy has a myriad of other benefits, too many to list here.

in usa instead of public health we blame victims for their bad choices unless we like them and in that case we say god works in mysterious ways

With ACA being generally accessible, how can a 50 years old person with cancer incur in yearly health expenses higher than premiums + max out of pocket? Or is such amount, which heavily depends on your income but should not exceed a couple $10ks a year (and would go down significantly if you have no income), what would cause you to sell your house?

Exercise, eat healthy, have good health insurance and max out HSA.

Something has to give with healthcare in this country. Whatever it is will likely break the economy. Moving to another country is a big gamble, make sure you understand the trade offs. You might get better healthcare but have other day-to-day issues that the US doesn’t have.

If you can't leave USA, you got to just get your bag and understand that you need a lot, more than what people think is normal. You can pay for private medical care it's just expensive. Like it's too expensive for people who don't inherit wealth and aren't lucky or hustlers of some kind.

I can leave the USA. And having to pay so much for healthcare already, it sickens me that I need _more_ to be taken care of in this country. That's why I'm curious what other people are doing here.

I'll hit the eject button on the USA at some point if things don't change.

Be careful where you move to get free healthcare. Lots of countries have free healthcare. However, since you're worried about getting cancer when you are old, you also need to consider that, in a lot of countries that offer free healthcare by rationing it, you may have to wait several months to get the cancer treatment you need to survive. You could wind up dying while waiting for your scheduled "free" surgery. As you might imagine, cancer can spread very quickly if left untreated. The links below cover cancer waiting times in Canada and the UK. It's sad to read some of the comments mentioning a four month wait to get treated for cancer.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/waiting-...

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/10/cancer-waiting-...

Since most people would prefer critical services to be free and promptly rendered, it wouldn't surprise me if people wanted to dispute the above links. Since I would also love to live in a perfect world, it would be great if someone could provide data on countries that offer free (and timely!) cancer treatment or if they could find data to refute the above links.

For my wife the wait period was 8 days and the bill was 300 Euro (cancer). We live in the Netherlands.

I've heard of a gentleman who is around that age and diagnosed with cancer, not long ago. I dunno details but he got arrested for DUI and from what I hear is arranging things like he expects to be in jail for a while.

I think that is his plan for getting treatment.

His plan was to get arrested so he can get treated for cancer?

State might pay for treatment while he's in jail

Really puts the phrase “ends justify the means” in perspective

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