The Best American Insurance is a Plane Ticket
The best American health insurance is a plane ticket, when the EU and/or Canada lift their travel ban on Americans living in a Trumpian COVID petri dish. Examples of healthcare costs in Latvia, where I live (GDP per capita $18500): Private health insurance through a friend's company's group policy: 305 euros/year. ENT specialist visit: 30 euros, insurance covers 20.00. Physical therapy visit: 9-24 euros, average 15.00. Orthopedist visit: 30 euros, all covered by insurance. Sports medicine clinic visit: 30 euros, all covered by insurance. Appendicitis ambulance, surgery, hospital stay: 1024 euros, 800.00 covered by insurance. Cataract surgery, both eyes: 1800 euros, 50% covered by insurance. Knee surgery by the two best sports medicine surgeons in Latvia who treat lots of pro athletes: 650 euros, 450 euros covered by insurance (I've had two). Rotator cuff surgery and recovery hospital stay in 2016: 1870 euros, 800.00 covered by insurance. MRI due to hip pain from playing basketball 3x/week: 150/200 euros covered. Had I been a permanent resident of Latvia, and not year to year through marriage, my deductibles would have been much lower — in a country with less than 1/3 the GDP per capita of the USA.
I never put off doctor visits due to money worries. If you can work from anywhere, emigrate at least as far as Canada (definition of a Canadian: American with healthcare and no gun).
How to understand the predatory American healthcare system: socialism with no planning combined with capitalism with no free market. The Nobel prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow proved in 1963 that free markets in healthcare don't work due to information and bargaining power asymmetry (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1812044?seq=1 ). The American healthcare system is the very essence of the Einsteinian definition of insanity: trying the same approach over and over again and thinking you'll get a different result. If Americans do not dismantle the plutocrats' plantation they live on run by Big Finance/Pharma/Oil&Gas/Agribusiness&Food/Insurance/Tech&Media by finding a Roosevelt 3.0 to confront the "economic royalists" with "I welcome their hatred" (FDR's words), their toxic downward spiral of obesity, opioid, gun violence and other epidemics and environmental and climate degradation will not cease. Biden will do it only if you force him to.
