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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Considering:

- health insurance rarely pays for what they do, balance bill you several thousands of dollars every time you have a regular check up for an incurable health issue, and it often requires legal notices and lots of lost work hours on the phone with debt collectors, insurance, hospitals

- rent figures don't include my $200 electric bill, $200 water bill, $70 internet bill that comcast decided to charge me $170 last month out of nowhere, $50 trash bill, another $200 in maintainence just to keep the place livable because the landlord won't do it for you

- transportation isn't cheap. a rock hit the bottom of my car last month on the highway and it cost $700 to repair. tires wore out and that costs $1000. DMV charge me $600 a year just for the hell of it. insurance costs $200/month. other costs are upwards of $200/month just to use the damn thing. and then there's parking, energy costs, fastrak costs, ...

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> health insurance rarely pays for what they do, balance bill you several thousands of dollars every time you have a regular check up for an incurable health issue, and it often requires legal notices and lots of lost work hours on the phone with debt collectors, insurance, hospitals

Despite what the news will tell you, most SW engineers don't deal with this. In over a decade of working, with lots of interactions with the medical system, not one of these has manifested for me nor for my friends.

> transportation isn't cheap. a rock hit the bottom of my car last month on the highway and it cost $700 to repair. tires wore out and that costs $1000. DMV charge me $600 a year just for the hell of it. insurance costs $200/month. other costs are upwards of $200/month just to use the damn thing. and then there's parking, energy costs, fastrak costs, ...

There's a whole country out there where you don't pay most of these fees. I pay a sixth of what you do to the DMV, and half what you pay for insurance (and I have more than the bare minimum). Repairs? Yeah, sometimes I have to pay a lot. But something on the order of $700 for a single repair is one of those "once every 3-4 years" things for me, for 2 cars.

> Despite what the news will tell you, most SW engineers don't deal with this. In over a decade of working, with lots of interactions with the medical system, not one of these has manifested for me nor for my friends.

I'm a software engineer, and I dealt with this multiple times a year until I joined a big corp. In all my years of startup life it was the norm to constantly battle the system and have several thousand dollar medical bills thrown at me all the time even though I had insurance. I don't actually talk about it a lot, because there's nobody to talk to who will actually fix the system, short of moving to another country. As I understand it, this is the state of "21st century life in the US".

At a big corp, things are different, insurances are shit scared of big corp HR ditching their policy so they pay for everything.

I mean this with the utmost sincerity: Get better insurance. Or work in a company with good contracts with insurance companies. Like probably any Fortune 500 company.

(Either that or understand your insurance better).

> Get better insurance

Back when I was a contractor I was on $850/month insurance and they paid for almost nothing. Deductible was $6K and even after that they paid for almost nothing.

Maybe $1600/month+ insurance would pay for something, but then it's questionable whether it's a good deal.

None of the marketplace plans covered the only couple of medical institutions in my area I trusted to give me a life-saving medical implant for a condition not well understood.

That sucks. I can believe if you have a tough medical condition then there's no limit to how expensive life can be :-(

And yes, marketplace insurance is poor. I get paid a fraction of $500K and the deductible for the whole family is under $4K. Max out of pocket is about $5K, but we never hit it. I don't pay any premiums. If I were single, it would be much cheaper - I mostly pay for the dependents. Big companies negotiate good deals, and they'll often have employees who will act as your advocate for weird billing problems. Insurance companies don't want to upset a big client.

Sad fact of life in the US that one of the reasons people cling to soul sucking jobs is this - even when they have enough money to retire (but still too young for Medicare).

Arxiv is run by Cornell, which is in Ithaca NY. Upstate NY a $500k a year salary would literally buy you a mansion. Ithaca right by the college is pretty expensive by upstate standards because of houses being converted to multi-family units to rent. But Ithaca for $500k is buying you a big house walking distance to downtown, if you go out of the city $500k is buying you a big house with a large amount of land.

If only you had that $500K ...

But the government will steal $250K of it right off the bat. And then probably another $50K because at least in CA you get double-taxed both when earning and when spending.

You're left with only $200K real dollars.

10.25 percent (highest sales tax rate in CA - 1) of 250k is closer to 31.25k. State and fed taxes income taxes are around 45% but I'll grant you there's other hidden fees (social security and others)... luckily hidden fees are now illegal in CA.

[1]: https://www.avalara.com/taxrates/en/state-rates/california.h...

You can easily get a mortgage for 3x income and 4x isn't that hard. So $500k can buy a $1.5m house with no problem. $500k income is easy to buy a house forth $500k cash after a couple years.

Most people don't live in California.

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