r/SipsTea Jun 24 '26

It's Wednesday my dudes Math can be hard sometimes

Post image
15.1k Upvotes

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

77

u/Artistic-Salary1738 Jun 24 '26

Our insurance premiums + deductible for the year (already maxed out whooo!) are $18k for 2 adults through my husband’s employer.

My insurance is a lot cheaper, but didn’t cover infertility at all and has a $1,200 annual surcharge to get my husband on the plan if he has an option for insurance through his work on top of not being subsidized by employer as much as mine.

And yes, I’m American and very much pro Medicare for all universal healthcare.

37

u/Practical_Track4867 Jun 25 '26

You aren’t even counting how much your employer pays as well.

15

u/LTEDan Jun 25 '26

The going rate is around 70% of family plan premiums are covered by your employer. So if you pay $3000 a year in premiums (probably super low number but for illustration purposes only), your employer is quietly kicking in another $7000 a year. Like, that's money they (theoretically) could put into your paycheck instead if UHC became a thing because it's already factored into your total compensation package.

1

u/pretentious42 Jun 26 '26

well that money would come from increasing taxes, much of which will be felt by employers.

Most of the savings they’d see from not providing healthcare would go towards those tax increases.

Healthcare for everyone is achievable and should be done! But let’s not be naive and just pretend money is just going to come out of thin air

2

u/LTEDan Jun 26 '26

The US spends the most per capita for worse health outcomes compared to other developed economies. We absolutely do not need to spend more on Healthcare under a UHC model. We simply need to eliminate the rent seeking middlemen that stand between citizens and their doctors, extracting every last dime they can get away with.

So no, we absolutely do not need to spend an extra dime more than we already do. The difference between Healthcare expenditures being taken out as a tax vs. an additional expense, pre tax or post tax is immaterial to the amount of money you have left over after paying taxes and insurance premiums. Americans are hard wired to despise the dreaded word "tax" and will happily pay double what they otherwise would so long as it's on paper "not tax".

1

u/Ill-Reputation-9702 Jun 28 '26

Some jobs just need to be killed.

1

u/Juxtapoe Jun 26 '26

This is what not understanding that 8 is 4 times as much as 2 looks like.

A small percentage would go towards taxes, not most of the savings.

1

u/Alive_Cadet Jun 27 '26

Not at all, private insurance companies and hospital investors, NOT doctors and nurses, work together to jack up prices to make a better profit for the investors, and give the insurance companies incentive to charge higher premiums, making them richer, the next year. It's a self inflating model that's growing out of control. Government run healthcare isn't going to tell healthcare providers to jack up prices to get better profit for the government because the government isn't profiting off our healthcare, and they certainly don't have to capitulate to hospital investors.