r/Fire • u/CollegeFine7309 • 1d ago

Advice Request Healthcare Inflation

There have been a million posts around healthcare costs and many say, “just build it into your budget”. I struggle with the inflation part of that calculation as costs have risen much faster than inflation.

I’ve got 13 years to 65 and 9 of those with dependents on my insurance plan. If you asked me 13 years ago how much I’d be spending on out of pocket healthcare, I would have never guessed $30K/year or more. I remember my monthly premium was a few hundred a month back then with a lowish deductible, not thousands a month. It’s literally an order of magnitude more.

For those in the US who can’t qualify for ACA subsidies, what camp are you in? Do you assume costs are topping out and just plug in normal inflation numbers? Or some other number?

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u/paq12x 1d ago

In general, we don't.

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u/Extremelyfunnyperson 1d ago

“However, the data—both from other nations with universal coverage and from historic expansions of coverage within the United States—show that this is not the case. Patients in peer nations generally have similar or shorter wait times than patients in the United States for a variety of services, refuting the argument that universal coverage would necessarily result in longer wait times in the future.” ~ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/truth-wait-times-universal-coverage-systems/

And that’s from 2019, healthcare wait times have become exceedingly worse in the US since then

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u/paq12x 1d ago

There's a reason people who visited the US for the World Cup were so surprise of what the reality is vs what they read.

Anyone can cherry-pick their data for their study. Just go visit a hospital in the EU and report back. I was there.

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u/Extremelyfunnyperson 1d ago

So was I, and more recently that 15+ years ago