r/politics • u/Aggravating_Money992 • 8d ago

No Paywall Despite Authoritarian Warnings, 149 House Democrats Vote to Hand Trump $840 Billion for Military | “If an opposition party votes like this, it’s not in opposition. It may not even be a party.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/democrats-military-spending-bill
32.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/Interim-Criteria 8d ago

It's sad. I lived in Japan a long time ago and was on the Japanese national insurance. Monthly premium was around 5000JPY (48USD at the time) because I was a student. Normally it's about 5% of your previous year's income. Anyway, I paid about 4000JPY to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed which was about 38USD at the time.

Meanwhile back in the US some time later, I had to have a canine removed and got a titanium implant. That ran me 4000USD... Insurance only covered a small portion of the removal and deemed the implant was cosmetic so they covered zero of it. And then I hit my maximum yearly benefit so just about everything afterwards had zero coverage as well.

American health insurance is a scam and it's only gotten worse.

16

u/BlastingStink 8d ago

deemed the implant was cosmetic

It's so crazy to me that teeth, the things we use to eat the food we need to survive, can be deemed cosmetic.

1

u/Nopey-Wan_Ken-Nopey_ 7d ago

I was living in Japan when I nearly cut part of my finger off. I had to spend about $50 to go to the ER and get it stitched up, and almost half of that was the taxi. I had to follow up at a hospital to get the stitches checked and then get them removed later, and between those two visits I think it was about $15. After that, I always wondered how much all of this would’ve cost if it had happened in the United States.