07-02-2012, 01:48 PM
(06-29-2012, 09:53 PM)NuurAbSaal Wrote: Excuse my welfare-state communist ignorance, but is this the origin of the sometimes heard phrase "but we have good dental" in American movies?
I didn't realize you weren't joking. Yes, this is the origin, usually expressed as something like "this job is crap, but at least we have good dental [insurance]." In the US, your health insurance is provided by your employer, who takes advantage of group policy rates along with fronting part of the monthly cost to keep your individual costs down.
As a theoretical example with made-up numbers: if you want to buy your own health insurance, it will cost $2000 a month. If you gain health insurance through your employer, they work out a group policy with the insurance company that reduces that cost to $1000 a month per person, and then the employer themselves pay $800 a month of that, leaving you with a $200 payment (which is then also deducted from your taxable income).
So you go from a $2000 a month bill to $200. You don't ever want to lose your job, because suddenly you incur this gigantic cost. The same thing applies to dental insurance, although the numbers are lower. The examples you hear of that are so painful usually fall along the lines of either:
1) Person loses their job, can't afford to pay their own healthcare, and then has an emergency happen right at the worst moment. They're stuck with millions of dollars of medical expenses they can't pay.
2) Young person foolishly thinks they don't need medical insurance, has some horrible thing happen to them, and is stuck with a medical bill they spend the rest of their lives to pay off.
Add to this the issue that medical expenses are radically inflated under the current system. If you don't have insurance, any medical procedure will cost 10 times what it should. It's economically suicidal to not have medical insurance.
The idea behind Obamacare is that if everyone has to buy in to health insurance, the healthy people pay for the sick. Just as employers can take advantage of group insurance rates because the younger and healthier employees essentially subsidize the older and sicker ones, this is now expanded to the general population.
In theory, it works. In reality...well, we're going to find out pretty soon.
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.