WRITTEN BY JOHN DABBS
It is not a real estate topic, but it is a real issue for us all. Obamacare may suck for some and suit others, and Trump’s plan would have done likewise. But something is fundamentally wrong with the health care plan, the proposals and the structure it works in.
I write this from the perspective of a naturalized citizen of this country who found a legal way through the invisible wall to make a new life. I come from a third world country at the end of the alphabet and the bottom of the food chain, where the currency collapsed in 2008 without having anything to do with what we experienced here in the US. Pictured below is a bank not that was worth about US$10 back when it was printed. Later that day it was worth about US$1! At its worst, inflation was estimated to be in the billion-percent range.
Things actually got worse and a One Hundred Trillion Dollar Note entered circulation but now things have improved and the note above can be purchased as a curio for about a dollar in the local flea markets!
But, despite this debacle, I can relate a few positive anecdotes of the health care system out there. My elderly parents’ circumstances provided me with the material.
My father had eye surgery and the cost to him was the frame for a new pair of glasses.
Last year my mother was rushed to the ER clinic by ambulance at midnight and spent three days in the Intensive Care unit. Total out-of pocket expenses: US$200 to the doctor.
Last month she was put on a regime of Xarelto. One month’s supply purchased there, including tax is US$130. I checked two suppliers here for prices without any insurance cover: USD330 a month and US$440. It should be the other way around.
It is not the doctors milking us here, it is the sponge of large pharma and insurance companies endemic to the system, I would speculate.
BTW, the cost of my mother’s insurance is US$62 a month. “Not sustainable” I hear you say but it has been in place since 1980, and before, and survived the currency crisis noted above. It should be a walk in the park for us, then, to get something going.