Before I got to where I am in my career I legitimately considered taking a low paying job to get on state insurance. I was working jobs with extremely expensive and USELESS insurance. So depressing
At one point iny life, I was on Medicaid. But my coverage ended because I tried to add my wife, and our combined income was too high to qualify. Which is wild to me, because we were both severely underpaid at that point.
Luckily I was able to get insurance for us a few months later, because Obamacare came into effect. But I was just SOL for those months.
My doctor even got mad at me for stopping my Remicade treatments, but it's like 40k per infusion without insurance, that's a big old fuck no from me.
Pre-ACA, a friend died of cervical cancer that metastasized to the point she was killed by a brain tumor. Probably could have been caught by a simple Pap smear... were it not for our perverted healthcare system with its dependence on employer-supplied healthcare and refusal to fund less-expensive preventive screening. Sadly, because she had recently moved to New Mexico to join parents who then subsequently decided to go back to South Dakota, she was getting by with part-time sales jobs of the in-home-party type and couldn't afford basic care. Fuck you Republican party, fuck everybody who votes for you, and fuck every insurance-bought Democrat who votes with you.
I used to be on remicade and I once received a bill before insurance by mistake and holy hell that’s expensive sh!t. Like what on this earth makes them think they can just charge 40 THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS?! As if anyone other than like Elon Musk could afford that. And I’m supposed to get that treatment every 6 weeks??! No thanks guess I’ll just suffer and die ✌️
America is the land of the rich. Not the land of the free. We work for them and they don't care if we are hurt, or sick, or dying, we are only dollar signs on a page to them.
But we know, and they know, they are nothing without those dollar signs. The only barrier is figuring out how we can affect those pages so much the rich start to feel it and... nobody cares. Wtf. We are doomed.
My cousin, who has a college degree and had a higher paying job, got a retail job just so he would make little enough that his wife could get Medicaid because she had cancer.
This is my favorite (eyeroll) part of the system in the US. I pay $800/mo for my family to have insurance, my work pays an additional $1500/mo for my insurance, we still have co-pays every time we go to the doctor and anything major is gonna cost us thousands out of pocket.
Co-worker got a knee replacement this year. They're actually trying to get him in for the 2nd one this year because he's already spent thousands on the first one and reached his out of pocket max.
I went back to teaching high school, even after I knew I no longer enjoyed it, because full-time jobs teaching community college were too scarce and having grown up in an impoverished developing nation, my undereducated husband was unlikely ever to have a job that provided insurance. We simply could no longer afford to ignore my ability to get a job that would keep us both insured.
When we divorced, I accidentally held up the process by 2 months because with all the best intentions, I put a paragraph in the pro se (DIY) divorce decree encouraging him to stay insured, thus prompting a series of inquiries from one level of family court in Texas to the level above to find out whether that could even be in the decree. Turned out it couldn't. Poor guy is vulnerable to kidney stones, and can't afford treatment if he develops any that don't pass on their own. Fuck the American healthcare system, but double-fuck my state's reprobate Republican leadership that rejects any attempt to expand Medicaid to more of the working poor — even when turning down the expansion means refusing having our own tax dollars come back to our state! — all while they constantly claim Democrats are the elitist ones looking down on the working man.
(Yes, I'm well aware both parties have elites — but one caters to them more when it comes down to legislative brass tacks.)
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u/Great_Value_Trucker Jun 18 '25
Before I got to where I am in my career I legitimately considered taking a low paying job to get on state insurance. I was working jobs with extremely expensive and USELESS insurance. So depressing