It's wildly inconsistent. Surgeries, hospitalizations and specialists are mostly ridiculous. You can find affordable general/nurse practitioners if you know where to look and what to ask for.
Call around and ask "What is your self cash pay cost?".
Most people don't know to ask that and if you don't speak the magic phrase then you get billed at the rate the office would normally charge insurance. Not all places have self pay discounts.
Some states have special programs for hospitals but they vary wildly by state and you have to know how to navigate that particular program and be very patient. Some are need based so if you are above a pretty low income threshold you won't qualify.
It's really not, for common/minor issues. I use a little cash-pay clinic in a MCOL area and mostly spend <$100, never over $200, per visit. Also, my wife recently had some major dental work done, and it was about $350. All of this without getting insurance involved.
There are definitely ways to rack up big bills fast, though, just by being unlucky.
It's not quite PE (yet); doctors are getting annoyed themselves at how healthcare is playing out. Picture things like electronically messaging your doctor now has convoluted billing behind each conversation now based on the level of effort the doctor has to put in. They're getting annoyed now that they've been bought out by hospital systems and been working underneath them for a while doing family practices and other healthcare services. The paychecks were good, but the red tape got annoying over the years.
So they exit the whole system and go to a direct "you pay me monthly for access" model. Hundred bucks a person or so per month, factor a ~25% discount for families. Doc gets to keep a cap on the limit of incoming patients to manage their own day pretty nicely while getting a recurring stream of cash paid direct to him.
Even better if your wife's also a doctor (hey, healthcare partners run together a lot!), you just band together, see 5-600 patients a month as a couple, and pull in a decent $million or so on a fairly light workload and selling extra things like GLP-1s and wellness programs for a year's work. Triple-points if you're doing this in rural America - that million might not be a lot to the big techies out there, but that's big bucks that go far in some really nice places tucked away in the trees and forests.
You still need insurance for the rest of the 'stuff' they don't do, but some of these DPCs are doing everything they can in house (like prescribing and dispensing generics at the office directly in a single visit to lower your extra out of pocket costs).
If you're on a high deductible healthcare plan with an HSA and an employer contributing healthily into it, these direct-patient-care clinics may be an attractive option if you're reasonably healthy and young.
It isn't a homogeneous experience, so you will get different stories. Most Americans get their healthcare provided by their employer, so their company determines what is covered and their financial exposure.
My United Healthcare plan limits my out of pocket expenses to $2,000 per year.
Like most Americans, "United Healthcare" is just the company that does the billing and adjudication. My Employer sets policy and pays for treatment at the end of the day.
Care to explain how this relates to Leopold? I know they hold some stake in Anthropic, but I’m not proficient enough in the topic to jump to the conclusion you’re alluding to.
Sure, a month ago the market was roaring and Anthropic first floated going public. Then suddenly all AI-related stocks drop 30%+ over a week and people claimed the jig was up. No chance for Anthropic IPO.
Turns out it was mainly just caused by one hedge fund (Citadel) targeting another hedge fund (Leopold). He got liquidated and Citadel picked up his portfolio for pennies. Market subsequently soared to even higher highs in the last few weeks and, poof, Anthropic is going public again.
That’s the narrative anyways - the big drop was just Leopold getting liquidated and not a larger market downturn.
I can relate to this feeling, having encountered it many times in academia. But the inverse would also be true, would you stop reading yet another article that explains for the umpteenth time what library Y does? Not arguing for the author, but there’s certainly something about knowing and writing for your audience.
The animation in the background is fun, but really impairs readability on mobile. At least there’s Reader mode in browsers, but a pity that the original form isn’t accessible!
Apologies! Not much of a UI guy and I thought I dimmed it sufficiently for the text to be readable. I might reduce the rows of eyes from 4 to 2 for mobile tomorrow morning or whatever helps. Let me know!
I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle
Agreed. This reeks LLM writing with no human oversight, or at least a human with no writing experience. The text underneath “The Click” is an immediate giveaway:
> Five milliseconds of hardware and browser bookkeeping before a single byte leaves the laptop.
I don’t even know how to describe it, but the “[…] before X” sentence style stands out to me.
