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Comment by 4death4 | Hacker News Reader

Couldn’t you have enrolled in a plan that would have covered your treatment after the fact? I think you have 30 days to do so after losing coverage. I agree that the current system in the US is insane, but what was your plan originally for when you lost coverage?

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GP could be referring to treatment being covered under the prior year deductible or max out of pocket.

I have a friend who was hospitalized on December 30th and released on January 2nd. And that's how they hit their max out of pocket two times over the course of 4 days.

It's an awful edge case. If they'd gotten terrible vertigo a couple days earlier or later, it would have cost them half as much.

doing this on an annual basis is such an obviously inefficient system (on both sides) that you'd think somebody would've developed a basic mathematical approach by now to disrupt the market.

but of course in practice, most US healthcare consumers don't really have an actual choice about who they buy their healthcare from.

Annual basis for what is a lifetime time frame is one of those things that's bonkers the harder you think about it.

I knew a guy. In 2008 his wife's company went under. So lost the health insurance she'd had for 15 years. No COBRA and in 2008 no ACA either. Her gall bladder got infected and they had to put a second mortgage on their house. Both of them had been paying for insurance for 25 years at that point.

Me I didn't have health insurance between 18 and 40 when I started working for a big corp. Two years later racked up $50k in medical bills. Insurance paid almost all of it.

Crazy.

Weird America-only medical bullshit: it costs way more money to have a pregnancy that spans 2 calendar years, than if you keep it all in one year.

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