The American medical system is an absolute travesty. To be fair to you though, this only really becomes obvious when one experiences functioning medical systems in other countries.
How else would health insurance executives, hospital executives, and doctors afford their third million dollar home? The system is working just fine for them.
Hospital execs -> a racket, but hospitals are being bought up by PE firms rn so I'd say you probably want to include portfolio managers
Doctors -> in general probably not. I've met some physicians that have made me feel sour about them in general, but even with FFS they're not benefiting nearly as much as hospital suppliers and insurance companies. Specialists definitely receive a boost, but this is like saying L7+ at FAANG is representative of SWEs as a whole. Factor in med school, residencies, and fellowships required to enter specialties, and there are also a lot of earning years lost. We should really be encouraging more students to go into medicine in spite of this, which would improve care by reducing the number of pts each physician needs to serve[^1].
Except for me; they didn't get any yacht payments from me. When we had a medical disaster, I filed for bankruptcy once the bills came in, and this is with good insurance. It really didn't affect my credit score, and we bought a house and car 18 months afterwards.
Sometimes bad things happen to good people, through no fault of their own.
I mean, rich fat cats get debt forgiveness when things don't work out for them.
I'm guessing your assets were wiped out but you were able to qualify for house and car later due to cash flow. Anything I'm missing? Thanks for sharing btw
I've had the good (bad?) luck to go through a few non-US systems and can say that you have to get pretty far down the OECD development index to hit U.S. medical system level of terribleness.
