quote:Originally posted by SalesServiceGuy:
I have an active copier service technician in my territory who was just diagnosed with Terminal Cancer. He has very modest financial resources. In Canada, he is able to access almost free medical care and immediately apply for long term disability.
Not really knowing the details of "Obamacare", what would happen to this tech in the USA?
Depends upon the insurance he has, assuming he has any. (Obamacare includes a mandate to buy insurance, which is implemented as a fine (scaling up to $695 a year in 2016) but it doesn't go into effect until 2014).
Under most plans, the patient would have a deductible (wildly different on different plans, but probably more than $500 and less than $5,000) that he would have to cover, then the insurance will (probably) cover 70-80% of the charges.
In the end, depending upon what treatment was needed, how long it took, etc., the patient would probably wind up with a bill between $10k and $50k. It could be more, but it most likely wouldn't be less.
Those are results from an "average" plan, the actual plan he had could be much better or much worse, impossible to say.
Worth noting, Obamacare isn't universal coverage, so the consumer still faces these issues.
Before Obamacare, most plans also included a "maximum lifetime payout" the patient could have hit and if he left his job and changed insurance he could have been hit with the "pre-existing condition" meaning they wouldn't pay for something that was wrong with him before the insurance started. Both of those were eliminated in Obamacare.
Long Term Disability is a separate plan, so again, it depends on if such a plan was available and if he elected to purchase it as to whether he would be covered.