this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
731 points (95.1% liked)
Greentext
7466 readers
1250 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Look I'll be honest with you. As someone outside the US the idea that your workplace is responsible for your private insurance / healthcare is bug fuck insane and open to exploitation on a mind boggling scale.
Not just open to exploitation; openly exploited. Disruption to coverage and questions about what could be covered differently are significant factors that cause people to choose not to take a job elsewhere.
The trick is that health insurance can be bought directly, but it's just so insanely expensive to do it that way so nobody does. Companies get a huge discount to buy bulk enterprise packages, and then their employees pay for a lot of it themselves. The portion that the company pays for is just an expense of labor, the same as salary, and offering better than the company across the street is an incentive to get better hires.
The ACA basically was just "hey, you know that discount that companies are getting? Now do it for the state and we'll offer it to everybody. And insurance companies will like it because people are given incentive to buy this because we're gonna fine people for not being insured." Pretty shitty deal, but at least people had the freedom to jobhop or become unemployed and keep their doctors.
It's cheaper and easier to buy a gun than to get an abortion in this shithole country.
Classic US capitalism: Take a product, triple the price, and then offer a generous 50% discount if you sign up on unfavourable terms.
But yeah, I guess I am preaching to the choir here.
Look at it like this: in America, a sizeable portion of people think that your direct economic utility is a good measure of if you deserve to live. They'll justify it by saying things like "they don't think it's governments place" to provide social services, and that it's better handled through charity.
If you don't have a workplace you need to go for real American style socialized medicine: GoFundMe.
(The history behind it is that before anyone was really doing socialized healthcare workplaces in the US started offering health insurance as a way to increase compensation during the WW2 wage freezes. Eventually it was so pervasive that it was a recognized form of compensation, and then it was the easiest way to dictate that everyone had insurance, since a lot of people listened to the fear mongering that was going on. "Nothing changes you just can't get kicked off for developing cancer". It also lined up with the beliefs of those who think that people who aren't working don't deserve support)