I Don't Want To Go To Work

Capitalism is too 90s.

Stop being old and obsolete

Out of network really hurts, do you not have HDCP / HSA type options? Insurance provided healthcare is a scam, for them to be profitable they need to provide $50 of healthcare for every $100 they take in once you add on all the administrative and processing crap. We found that it was a far better option to structure them as an "emergency only" provider with high deductible that was funded through pre-tax dollars with a limit while using their price setting contracts with healthcare providers.

Trying to do a whole "I pay you $2,000 per year and expect $10,000 in healthcare" isn't going to work. Understand that the healthcare providers inflate everything on their bills by 2~5x, then discount it by 50~80% during the network price negotiations. That is the real benefit of health insurance, the pre-negotiated set prices. Secondary benefit is catastrophic coverage, which is triggered once you hit that high deductible.

The HDCP + HSA system was the best thing to come out of the ACA, too bad it's just so poorly understood.

It's neither, it's all the hands in the way between the consumer and the provider. Each level is driven to take their cut of the money, especially with government money. There is so much fraud and corruption baked into the system that is obscures the true cost of services making informed decisions hard to make.

There are ways to handle this, but it requires educating people and those people then making smart choices. Getting people to make smart responsible decisions about food is hard enough without going into the complicated realm of finances.

High Deducible HSAs were around for at least a decade before ACA. (nothing good came out of the ACA).

I WISH.

The HDHP + HSA tax system was significantly expanded by the ACA.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p969

Health Savings Accounts (HSA) requires being on a HDCP and enable someone to put a large amount of medical expenses into pre-tax dollars.

• You can claim a tax deduction for contributions you, or someone other than your employer, make to your HSA even if you don’t itemize your deductions on Schedule A (Form 1040).

• Contributions to your HSA made by your employer (including contributions made through a cafeteria plan) may be excluded from your gross income.

• The contributions remain in your account until you use them.

• The interest or other earnings on the assets in the account are tax free.

• Distributions may be tax free if you pay qualified medical expenses. See Qualified medical expenses, later.
  

• An HSA is “portable.” It stays with you if you change employers or leave the work force.

With either a PPO or HMO plan the subscription fees (aka premiums), copays, deductions, and non-covered / out-of-networker bills are paid for with post-tax money. With a HSA you can move everything but the subscription fee to pre-tax money while also substantially lowering the subscription fee. Use of the funds in the HSA do not require approval from the health insurance company, you are free to use them for any qualified medical expense.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p969#en_US_2024_publink1000204083

Qualified medical expense is an immensely broad category. When my wife went back to Korea to visit her family, she also got LASIK eye surgery and some other cosmetic procedures (requires doctors approval) and paid for it with the HSA VISA card connected to my HSA. It works just like a credit card and can even reimburse yourself if you had to pay for someone out of pocket. I recommend people keep receipts when doing this incase the IRS ever does an audit.

Functionally it's a 401K with credit / debit cards connected to it. You contribute tax-free money along with your employer also providing tax-free money into it. You can then spend that money to meet your deductible. Once that happens the insurance provider is responsible for everything else (coinsurance can sometime exist for the lower deductibles), and because it's a HDCP there is very little room for them to play approval games with you. You can see whomever you want, no need for referrals or approvals, doctors visits become super easy once they see you have a HSA, they treat it like cash payment.

The downside is that it takes a year or two to get setup and going, but once going medical insurance ceases to be something you get worried about. You end up prepaying your entire deductible a year or two in advance, and it's money that belongs to you and goes with you if you change jobs, do not have a job or retire. All from pre-tax money, which is easily a 25~35% discount on medical costs.

My brother started dumping money into dividend stocks. It took him close to a year of progressive investing. Now he's making $900 a week off of weekly dividend stocks.

He quit his job as a welding lead and essentially just stays at home now. So it's possible to do if you play your investments right.

step 1: start with a decent paying job so you have money

step 2: invest during a period where the market is skyrocketing

it sounds good at a glance, but the kind of person who has no money and no job probably can't use that plan to retire

i would also say that quitting your job because you have $900/week passive income sounds incredibly shortsighted.. doubly so if it's through some shady ETF that is actually paying dividends by degrading your stock value

Having enough money to start making money is where you lose 100% of the audience.

Anyone who had the money already knows how to make money.

Not quite true. Just need to know options, save enough and have the mindset of earning early while you are young.

While you do you, I do think the idea of rushing marriage/kids is a quick way to have a poor life exactly when you are earning the less in your life. Depending on country and city obviously, but children cost with school and extra will keep on raising maybe faster than your income can increase.

About investments, I was never interested in playing with stocks. To me, learning stocks is like having a second job. And if Im willing to have a second job, could as well just something related with my proficiency in something.

But once a friend told me to use my savings and invest in government funds. Each country should have its particularities, but here, those government funds have low risk and slightly good return, something like either 14% a year, or 7% a year + inflaction.

This golden tip was given to me relatively early in my career life so Ive been slowly but steadly increasing my resorce, so much that I estimate I can net by those funds alone half of my early income at work by the reward alone.

So my advice relative to investment is: slowly but steadly. Dont be greedy like going to those high risk investment. I actually had a couple of money in some stock fund, but I noticed the fluctuation is so absurd in the world post pandemic that generally is a net loss if you arent doing daily trade.

I'm not certain. In the past, any HSA options were held back by higher premiums and lesser coverage tied to the plan. IIRC there was one of four main plans that had a HSA, but options expanded considerably last year, prior to that we only had 4-5 providers total. We moved to a plan like this and the provider was an absolute nightmare, so we had to move back. There are more as of last year, so I need to go through and see what's there, I will look for that though and see how we can take advantage of it if it's an option.

I'm gonna have to be more picky this year, I saw the numbers and the rate increase is around $800/mo.


ACA saved me from a lot of financial issues. I had a TBI due to a cycling accident that involved a bunch of head/facial trauma and the hospital network locally at the time was disputing rates with our insurance provider, so they were out of network for several months, part of which I was in the hospital. The ACA provision requiring all emergency care to be in network saved me a lot of money based on the claims I saw (think ambulance ride, neurosurgery consults, trauma ward, ICU, etc level care), which otherwise would've been out of network.

You do not start as a welding lead, that is the result of years of hard work, self learning and passing many tests and certifications.

Most of the trades are broken into tiers gated by written and practical tests along with a plethora of skills certifications. A persons rate is heavily tied to those, an apprentice welder gets paid very little compared to a journeyman welder with a dozen different skill certifications. And a master welder can run a site or open their own shop.

Trades aren't guaranteed success by any stretch, but they very much are a "you get what you put in" career.


You do not need to do this, just need to teach yourself a market segment and really understand it. I'm doing this exact thing with real estate, just with real estate. Within the next seven years I will have sufficient passive income to either stop working or reduce my weekly hours. The import part is that passive income lets you move to a low cost location like somewhere in South America or Asia.

i wasn't admonishing trades, i was just pointing out that the dude's post was acting like it was some path to success when the reality is that someone who doesn't already have a well-paying job or huge source of income cannot invest enough to live off dividends within a year(or even 5 or 10)

it's obviously possible to succeed investing, but the idea that someone can throw money at dividend stocks for a year and be able to retire is patently ridiculous.. there is a considerable amount of luck involved and i still suspect he's probably falling for nonsense like ULTY that degrades the stock value to pay the dividends

I've been doing all that since 2004ish (I think the 2nd year my employer offered), I googled looks like the original legislation was 2003. (i think this is less than a decade since ACA, but still long before it - and unrelated).

I'm a fan of HSAs, the only difference noted about HSAs pre/post ACA is how much expensive they are after (and having more difficulty with coverage).

ACA may have changed stuff with HSA but it did not invent them.


If you asked me in a vacuum if someone should have to pay out of network for a provider they did not have a choice in choosing I would say "no", but if you're going to overhall healthcare in that manner I'd make a stronger argument for why having "in network" at all, and why can providers change their networks on a whim, but the consumers are forced to make their decisions in a 10 day window (starts today for me!) in the year prior. its all dumb, anything that requires sufficient squinting to justify it should a priori be considered garbage. So "nothing" is certainly probably wrong (and it doesn't mean it hasn't helped any body) but medical care still outpaces the CPI and there's not a lot of evidence the rate at which it does has improved since the ACA.

The ACA significantly expanded the scope and benefits of having HDHP + HSA, specifically around MOOP and most importantly limiting how insurance companies can deny coverage after you hit that large deductible. It was the result of a compromise between the two parties instead of single payer medicare for all.

https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc502

Healthcare expenses have already been deductible but only if you itemize and forgo the standard deduction, plus do other hoops with accompanying limits. The expansion was opening up the list of what qualified while also keeping the standard deduction and removing the limits.

The ACA had a bunch of bad crap in it, but there are several things it did well. First was expanding the aforementioned tax advantaged health system, second was placing limits on how insurance providers could get out of their obligations.

That last part is very important as prior to that, insurance companies would deny coverage as a matter of policy then make you fight them to get anything approved, while delaying as long as possible hoping you would die. Insurance companies were not entering into the legal contract under good faith, and that is something I have a problem with. Denying medical coverage to a pregnant women because they unilaterally decided that pregnancy was "preexisting condition". Denying coverage because you moved jobs two years ago and had a headache so your current problem must be a "preexisting condition".

Since people frequently move jobs every couple of years and health insurance is heavily connected to your job, it's very easy to use "preexisting conditions" as an excuse to deny coverage then make the patent fight to try to get care they already paid for.

I'll just make a quick generic response to all that. I've hit my out of pocket max several times, never once have I been able to write any of it off. I've been doing itemized forms for 25 years. You can decide if my coverage is that good or I just make too much money, but all that "feels" irrelevant to me. (i am sure it affects people, it just has not affected me) I've never once (again) in 25 years been asked about preexisting conditions in employer plans.

THe people I know who have to do more personalized shopping largely prefer pre-ACA. I mean "do this, everything will be worse" is typically a bad selling point.

Insurance companies (and/or providers) still find ways to deny coverage or make you fight for it, my insurance company for a period of time had no in-network anesthesiologists in my entire state. So every bill was a fight.

Its just naive to think people won't game a system and the more complex the system the easier it is to find unscrupulous ways to do things. Spaghetti legislation is just as bad as spaghetti code.

It's more naive to sink a pile of money into something that wants to actively *** you worse than a hooker.
From some of the horror stories, you're better off trying to win the powerball in back to back draws than have an insurance company down there cover a band-aid, let alone an actual procedure of any kind.

This is because you didn't do you taxes with those expenses, yes they are deductible, no the IRS doesn't make it easy to do. I provided the IRS guidelines, it's up to you to figure the rest out.

Having said that, HSA contributions just sidestep having to do all that paperwork or track everything throughout the year since the money going in was already pre-tax and consequently lowered your AGI.





Prior to the ACA and it's restrictions on what insurance companies could do, they denied as a matter of policy. Didn't matter if it was covered or not, anything expense bigger then a cold got denied. This is because there are people who would either not fight it, or after fighting it would accept less then what the contract stipulated they should provide. All the lawsuits, settlements and fines were still less then the insurance companies were required to pay. It was such a one sided situation that it became a national issue that effected elections.


Most of those stories are either pre-ACA, grossly exaggerated or missing very important details. Prior to the ACA, no matter what you had written in the policy (contract), insurance companies could just retroactively change it whenever they want, play insane games and your only legal recourse was to sue them in court and have them settle for the amount they owned you anyway, after you paid your own legal fees of course. It was very profitable for them to just sell a promise, then deny it after you had been paying your premiums. The ACA took almost all the tricks away from them and made it such that the government would sue them if they failed to honor their requirements as an "ACA Compliant" plan. Insurance companies are happy to fight consumers but absolutely do not want to fight the US Government.

I'm a very big fan of free market capitalism, but the private health insurance market was such a one sided scam that something had to be done. Free markets require both sides to enter into good faith enforceable contracts with some amount of information and decision making power. The only way I'd imagine going back to pre-ACA is if the government mandated a fine of $1 million USD per day per individual per event for any company found to be violating it's contractual obligations.

I told you why my out of pocket max < 7.5% of my income. (read the link you posted!) So trust me when I say its in my form, it counts for 0.



I think you're painting too bad of a picture before and too rosy of a picture after. (FWIW my wife has worked for insurance companies and providers so I've gotten some insight from both sides). There are horror stories every where and there's also mischaracterization everywhere. There's also a lot of gamesmanship and shell games to follow the rules and pick up slack where the "free market" is legislated out. Not that I expect to change your mind and probably derailed the thread enough. Cheers.

A lot depends on who your insurer is.

By far the worst was a few years back, we had a policy that had 0 out of network coverage and they would deny everything. They refused my wife's 4 ob visits when she was pregnant, we had to fight for several months to get those covered and they were in network. They also had our hospital in network, but not all the doctors were in network, so things like anesthesia we had to pay 100% out of pocket.

We got doubly screwed because he was born with a lot of health problems in December, was in the NICU through a portion of January, and then had 3-4 ambulance rides and PICU stays the following year. The timing meant I had to pay out of pocket maxes for both years (surgery in Dec pushed that year over) and we hit them both. It's not a small number either, somewhere in the realm of 25-30k for each year, which doesn't including the out of network stuff that we paid 100% for.

OTOH our current insurer has never denied or questioned anything. I've had some procedures that could have been deemed not medically necessary but they never asked about. We've been with them for 5-6 years and had no issues with approvals or having to fight them over denials.

The cost of the two above was near identical and coverages (the out of network thing with the previous one being the big difference) the same, just one insurer is a pain in the *** about everything and the other isn't.

He has less experience than I do, and he made it there in roughly 2 years. From learning to weld to becoming a lead.

Still though, he was able to pick it up and be good with it. The same cannot be said for all people.

Capitalism is like PUGB or King of the Hill. Kill people, take their loot, upgrade your weapons to kill better and die with the most loot. Except that this only applies to the winner. The rest of the people would die early and go watch YouTube or something. You get paid to show up to make somebody get a lot of loot.

Socialism is like team work. You are as fast the dead last in your team. So every team is dead last. The Russian realized that if you give a good team leader a gun, he will shoot the laziest guy in the team and ended up with a VERY motivated team afterwards. For a while. Until they get new blood. Then the commissar is back!

After playing boss with a small business for a while. I realized the holy truth of the average worker. Essentially, only about a handful of people are getting the good pay and promotion simply because they can do the work of 2-3 people and always seem to be available for everything you need. Everyone else are expendable. If you aren't the memorable superstar, you are another cog in the machine and you can get replaced very quickly.

Such an accurate description of every attempt at communism ever made... well the killing of people and taking their loot part. Turns out people are very motivated to not "donate" their private property to a government, so that government ends up having to use guns and ditches to acquire said private property.


Yes this is just how humans are. Most will only do the bare minimum to not get fired. A handful really take pride in what they do and will push themselves, sometimes unhealthily, to solve challenges and move things forward. Good management recognizes the distinction and takes care of those highly motivated people while using the bare minimum folks to do the menial or repetitive work and make space for the super stars. Poorly managed organizations end up not doing this and cause those super stars to either become demotivated, or just leave for another place.

After a certain amount of time, every employee (including those superstars) will go home and decide if all their hardwork was worth it. Some people will make a shift and decide to work only so they can develop their passions, which could just be growing grapes in their backyard. Not everyone dreams of work from age 18-65 the entire time.

I've been a lead for a couple years, and this is hitting me hard now that I'm rebuilding the team from basically scratch. I've stopped more than once to think "Are my standards too high or does this person really just lack this much?".

Some days I'm doing the work of 3-4 people instead of actually leading.

Most people just suck. Weeding them out during interviews is really difficult and you end up hiring someone that doesn't do anything, but is hard to get rid of.

I have stories of insane incompetence across many industries, especially my own. I'm sure most do. It sucks but most people just don't care enough.

This entirely depends on your view of "work" and what motivates you. If you view "work" as something you do to get money so you can pay the bills and do something else, then you will naturally want to do the absolute minimum to get that money, this is natural. If someone's hobbies and past times are relevant to the work field, then they will not see it as "work" and be a lot more motivated. These guys are the innovators who create change.

Of course we then run into corporate politics and how much room those innovative individuals have to move. The larger and more bureaucratic an organization is, the less space the usually is for those individuals to excel.

You end up having a mix, a handful of high performers that are making change then a bunch of button pushers that do the menial stuff you do not want to burden your high performers with. Unless you are stupendously lucky, you won't be able to have an entire team of high performers.