Catastrophic health insurance makes no sense as an insurance product since the probability of catastrophic health event costing hundreds of thousands of dollars is so high as one ages. Heart disease and cancer is a given, and that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat, and premature babies are in the millions.

US health insurance is a combination healthcare purchasing agent/second opinion/fraud detection/insurance/tax collector.

A large part of a premium is a tax due to the maximum age rating factor that limits the prices old people pay to 3x or less what young people pay. It is also a tax because the insurer cannot underwrite the insureds, except on the basis of age, tobacco use, and location.

Stupid question but does that mean the “discount” comes from tax dollars? i.e. medical costs are spread out more but we’re also collectively spending more of our income on it?

You can buy it as long as you also have an HSA account, which you should have anyway because it’s pre tax.

Many studies find that a majority of personal bankruptcies in the US involve medical debt with some estimates of ~500,000 medical-cost contributed bankruptcies per year. A hospital (might) not kick you to the curb if you are dying in their emergency room. However, this is not the same as catastrophic coverage.

Nope. EMTALA means hospitals have to evaluate, and if necessary, stabilize you, and that’s it. If you’ve got a growing cancer or some expensive chronic disease that’s causing serious problems, they’ll do what they can to stop those problems from killing you in any given visit, but they absolutely will not treat cancer with the intent of curing it or help you control a chronic disease knowing they’ll never recoup payment. They’ll give you a prescription for insulin but they’re certainly not going to fill it for you, no matter how big of an emergency it is or how much the hospital visit cost. Even then, they still bill you for all of the services they do render and medical bills still bankrupt people. Needing to make sure someone isn’t going to die in the next few hours is very different from taking the financial responsibility for treating a very expensive medical problem.

Having doctors treat and stabilize patients because they are required by EMTALA is an entirely different animal than having catastrophic medical insurance.

Real catastrophic medical insurance caps how much you owe whereas the debt you accumulate from a doctor who was obligated to treat you is not capped. That debt follows you until you pay it off or declare bankruptcy like the 500,000 other Americans do each year.

To add insult to injury, we already spend $5000 per capita on our publicly funded healthcare system, which is enough to fund basic universal healthcare systems in other countries.

Let that sink in. We spend $11,000 per capita on healthcare per year. 45% is publicly funded with taxes and the other 55% is privately funded.

We’re already spending enough for TWO universal healthcare systems (for many countries), yet we have 500,000 filing for bankruptcy due to medical bills each year.

Based on what we’re spending, we can afford two systems: A socialist system that covers everyone and a private healthcare systems that provides world class treatments to anyone who can afford the insurance premiums.

Instead, we have two corrupt and dysfunctional systems, a lot of gaps, and a record number of people profiting off our dysfunction.

> taken out of the taxes of the person receiving the emergency care,

if it's that catastropic, I imagine their income would fall drastically that year, or years. What taxes?