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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Insurance (am American)
In some ways, Australia is actually worse than America. Not like, in terms of how "good" the overall system is. We've got you way beat there. But in terms of it being "a scam".
We have a really good public healthcare system called Medicare. But, if you're over 30, you're required to take out private health insurance anyway, or you pay the "Medicare Levy Surcharge" if you have above certain thresholds of income. This levy is not marginal, so you could theoretically take home less pay after getting a pay raise if it puts you over the next threshold.
Additionally, if you later do sign up for private health insurance, you pay an addition levy of 2% on top of the normal premiums for every year you waited. So sign up at 40 and you pay 20% more for insurance than you otherwise would have.
All this means more funding being funneled into the private health sector, taking resources away from the public system, increasing wait times for non-urgent procedures—except for those willing and able to pay to cut the queue. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is.
WTF? This makes no sense whatsoever
Welcome to the Australian Government!
Their logic is "it gets people out of the public system to take burden out of the public system". Neglecting completely the economies of scale that would be involved if the public system got all of that funding.
They have a similar attitude towards education. Private schools get a lot of funding (though thankfully not the scammy consumer-side incentives) from the government on the theory that they take students out of the public school system.
"Welcome to capitalism!"
FTFY
These guys have been ridiculing the AU government for years about everything
https://youtu.be/kecnSHmznic
I wish they had the budget and time to do the same to the US government
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/kecnSHmznic
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
conservative governments in Australia have been trying to kill off medicare and other public services for a long time. the problem is our progressive governments have refused to push back hard enough as it always results in election losses.
Basically the people are stupid, the media influences them, and the government is too spineless to take the risk needed to fix things.
Totally. Make a claim and suddenly your rates skyrocket. I’m trying to figure out what I have been paying for.
TrueAnon did a pretty good episode on this. Insurance was pretty straightforward before financialization kicked in on it - in the future get ready for pay-as-you-go insurance contracts where the rates change on a daily basis.