MedEwok wrote:
While socialism has failed
Has it? I think you will find that anything will fail, if the end result is that small minority gets all the power. If that power is economic, political or religious doesn’t seem to matter one bit. The result is the same; the few gets everything while the rest lives in servitude/poverty, still believing in the basic principles. being a good citizen etc. It’s human nature for some to believe they have the right to be better off than others, a privileged few. That’s how society will end up, unless the others do something about it.
LeSving wrote:
That’s how society will end up, unless the others do something about it.
Black Mirror and Hunger Games playing out in front of our very eyes and the majority look on in bemused befudlement signing up as fast as they can.
All marvellous stuff….
LeSving wrote:
I think you will find that anything will fail, if the end result is that small minority gets all the power
Very true. Chairman Mao famously turned on the gang of four and put an end to the Cultural Revolution when the Shanghai cadres announced true communism had been achieved, and the state was now abolished!
Hobbes’ Leviathan rules.
Jujupilote wrote:
For the record, how much do you pay for health insurance and what is your coverage Silvaire ? I think many Europeans here are curious. I will put what I pay once I get my hand on the numbers.
As much as I can 
With my employer I have a choice between three or four different health insurance plans, and I choose the one that provides almost total flexibility, no primary doctor assigned, go anywhere to any specialist without approval whenever you want and so on. To cover both my wife and I it is about $7000 a year, taken from gross pay and not taxed. We also pay something like $30 for any visit that isn’t preventative care, capped annually at some maximum out of pocket cost that I forget. The least expensive plan is less than half that amount IIRC.
Relative to my gross pay that health insurance cost is almost in the noise, and well worth it. My hangar rent is $5500 annually… also well worth it but one is more important than the other.
Using the numbers that silvaire posted doesnt tell the whole story… What ever he pays is only available at that price because of the job that he has and the deal that his employer has secured. That deal needs to extended for a period if your no longer employed under the cobra scheme however, there is catch, and i think you might wince if you knew what the premium might be…
One important concept of insurance is that sometimes unfortunate things happen.
The answer to that question is $1200/month but since I’ve been employed by the same company for over 30 years it’s not been an issue for me so far. I do keep at least $50K cash available however, for that reason and others.
I’m less concerned now with that possibility since paying off rental properties this year that make $5K per month gross. That took a while to achieve starting from zero but income diversification is good.
I guess that depends then if price makes you wince. However you won’t get that price if your really down on your luck. E.g out of work, let you cobra lapse and then something happens to you.
If you are in that situation (beyond COBRA) with very low monthly income your commercial health insurance premium is government subsidized. If “something happens”, which I interpret as meaning you are genuinely disabled from working, you will in addition receive government disability payments.
Thanks for posting these numbers, Silvaire, very insightful. I will gladly post my own figures for comparison:
I’m over the income threshold where you can opt out of using one of the German public health insurance companies, meaning I could “go private”. But I decided against that and instead pay the maximum insurance premium in the public system, currently ca. 860€/month, which works out to a yearly premium surprisingly similar to Silvaire.
In return, I get basically unlimited healthcare, with very little additional payments (e.g. 10€/day in a hospital, 5€/prescription medicine etc.). Note that there is no mandatory visit to a GP to access specialist health care, you can go to any specialist of your choice directly, but may have to put up with waiting times of several weeks up to months if you do (your GP might accelerate this).
My children are also automatically co-insured at 0€ additional cost under this system.
Interestingly the UK NHS costs £3k/year per person.
€860/month is a helluva lot of money. A heart bypass done privately costs under £20k (about 2/3 of an IO540 overhaul) so saving up two years’ premiums means you could have one every two years and still come out even. A single stent is about £10k. Any owner-pilot therefore doesn’t need health insurance
It was this sort of thing why I stopped paying private health insurance (BUPA back then) many years ago. I continued it for my family post-divorce but the ex just pocketed the money Even if one does not consider that the national system does emergency actions (broken legs, etc) pretty well and for free, there was no way that insurance made any sense. I think, in general terms and not commenting on anyone here, that insurance makes sense if
or some combination of the above.
I recall, many years ago, a BUPA saleswoman rather dishonestly selling their scheme saying it is especially good for cancer (the word which everyone fears most), but then someone in there told me BUPA offers nothing which the NHS doesn’t do.
To argue that the average person can make money out of insurance is to argue that insurers lose money, which they obviously don’t
