Have you had any stays in a hospital yet? Children?
I ask because a lot of Canadians can't fathom having to worry about those sorts of bills, given that many employers don't offer great insurance, and especially if you happen to be between employers. Like how do you handle a sudden $20k bill that insurance won't cover?
Yes to the hospital and no to children. My insurance covered the hospital without any issues, just a small copay and $300-ish bill that I paid over several months. I wouldn't say I have great insurance. It's some run of the mill bullshit conglomerate that covers most people in my area.
> especially if you happen to be between employers. Like how do you handle a sudden $20k bill that insurance won't cover?
My wife is, for all intents and purposes, unemployed (she's a photographer starting her own business). When she left her job at the end of 2023, she was able to get on state-sponsored insurance pretty quickly and easily without any hassle. It's better insurance than I have, they've covered every appointment, walk-in and emergency she's had without any charge to her. And this is in a deep red republican state that isn't known for supporting public health insurance.
As for how I would handle that bill? I'd first try to use the patient advocates at the hospital or my insurance company (that sounds scripted but I've used them before) to reverse the decision. At the same time I'd work with the hospital to set up a debt repayment/forgiveness plan. Tax-exempt hospitals in the US (which is almost all of them I think) are required to have financial assistance policies to maintain their tax-exempt status. If I'm broke and out of a job/insurance, I should be able to make it manageable or put it on forbearance until I'm able to pay it or get it forgiven.
Note: none of this is to say that I like the insurance situation here. I would prefer a public option.
You prefer a public option because you have never been to a Western country with public healthcare and tried to obtain emergency medical care. I have. I was in an overcrowded waiting room for 12 hours and watched one person die as they rushed him past me and around the corner. The whole character set and scene was extremely grim. There was ONE ER doctor on duty at night. Contrast that to the US where I received prompt emergency care and was only charged a couple hundred dollars which were eventually dropped because I qualified for their compassionate care write off since I make under a certain amount. Childcare hospital facility expenses (~$3000) were also written off each delivery because of the income qualification (400% of poverty line + household size factor in). The office of the doctor they contracted for the delivery stiffed me hard in my wife's third birth, but I am on a $100 a month payment plan for 12 months to pay it off. Considering the far better state of healthcare in the US than the extremely grim hospital scene I took part in the capital city of a Western European country, compounded with the discussions I had with the various characters I meet in the ER treatment waiting area, I can fully appreciate the disastrous effects public healthcare has. I'd rather fight a $50,000 bill than to go through the wringer again aka the public hospital. Coincidentally my grandmother died shortly after she there a few years after my incident. She slipped and fell on the front steps; they sent her home after a 5 minute cursory evaluation and she ended up dying from awful complications a few tens of hours later. Not to mention you have to actually pull strings with bribes to be seen sooner than 6+ months out for basic diagnostics or procedures. Each evaluation and treatment step is a wait of 6+ months.
To be clear, a public option means a government-backed health insurance plan that competes with private insurance plans to keep prices down. It doesn't mean abolishing private insurance and replacing it with public or universal healthcare. I don't personally believe European or Canadian-style healthcare systems would work in the US at this point and I don't want to try them here either.
In the US, you start a GoFundMe and beg everyone you know to help you pay your bills, and then work out a payment plan with the hospital, to be paid every paycheck for the next 3-20 years. What part of that seems unreasonable to you?
imo The final hurdle for mass adoption is solving the refueling planning problem.
I was in the market for a new car in 2024. Thought seriously about a few electric options but opted for another ICE vehicle because 2025/2026 are years of many road trips, and the issue that kept coming up for me was "can I just pull off any random highway and refill my car in a few minutes?"
Unfortunately for the environment I guess, I prefer not being forced to strictly plan my trips around distance and availability and speed of chargers. I can go pretty much anywhere in North America and be reasonably certain there's a gas station just off any highway, let alone an interstate.
"Oh, do the kids need to use the bathroom ASAP? Might as well fill up a quarter tank while we're there" opportunities would also vanish.
And even if charging stations were magically placed across the country to match gas stations, there'd still be the "time to charge" problem.
Not sure what age your kids are, but if they're below 10 I can guarantee you that your kids will be slowing you down, bit the car. Kids need to use the bathroom would be filling up the battery well over 25% if it wasn't almost full.
The one thing people that have never owned an EV seem to miss is the benefits that you get to experience every day.
No gearbox, so seamless acceleration.
No maintenance on, spark plugs, timing belts, gearbox. No oil changes.
A quieter ride, especially nice on a road trip.
The thing with young kids is they tend not to be good at timing restroom breaks with the availability of charging. By the time they tell you, you need to stop at the nearest gas station - they can't wait for you to drive 20 miles to the next charging station.
> No maintenance on, spark plugs, timing belts, gearbox. No oil changes. A quieter ride, especially nice on a road trip.
I'm thinking of getting an EV, so I'll see how much I like this. I can say that this is pretty much not a hassle for me with my ICE car - over the last 20+ years. But then I tend to buy reliable cars and didn't fall for the manufactured "3 months or 3000 miles" rule.
I keep track of all my costs. I average about $500 a year in maintenance (includes tires, oil changes, brakes, etc). I just checked with the insurance company - the increase in my annual premiums for the EV car I'm looking at is $400 more than if I got an equivalent ICE car. And one still needs to change tires, etc on an EV. So the repair/maintenance savings aren't there.
> The insurance part will settle out over time as they get more data I would imagine.
I'm not so sure. The issue is two-fold: First, If you get into an accident and you're at fault, the average damage is a lot more than with an ICE, due to the much heavier weight. Second, compared to an ICE, just about any repair is a lot more expensive. If some of the battery gets damaged, that's crazy expensive. There's also not a good ecosystem for parts - they are more expensive and less modular than with an ICE (or so I'm told).
It apparently is a lot more common for EVs to be declared a total loss compared to an ICE just because of the expense to repair.
> 500$ a year is very little for any car
This is over 3 different cars. And all of them very old (I bought two of them when they were 8 years old, and another when it was 15 years old - still driving that last one).
About $80/year for oil changes. That's it. Then every once in a while there is an expensive repair (brakes, tires, some engine problem, etc). Doesn't happen every year - so the average comes out to $500.
I also don't go to the official dealers. Everything is more expensive with them.
And yeah, the cars are old, so few electronic parts to repair. I imagine if I get another 8 year old ICE, the annual cost to repair will be more just due to the extra safety systems that can go wrong.
> but I opened a Nissan leaf for 8 years and spent less that 2K, of which 1K was for the AC
Leafs are the best case scenario. They're small, not heavy, and thus don't have much tire wear.
This is becoming less of an issue, but there’s no question it’s a barrier.
To be honest, the bigger barrier I see is around political will to charge the true social cost of gasoline.
Some nonprofits think the true cost of burning gas is $10-15/gallon. If filling up with gas cost $250 and charging an EV was 85% cheaper, I’d be willing to wait 30 minutes for an occasional charge.
Google still offered a path for business/individuals that allowed both sides to profit immensely via advertising. Google also guided people to sources of information once you look past the ads.
With the AI companies, they suck up all freely available and proprietary information, hide the sources, and give information away to consumers for mostly free.
The honest people are a larger group than the dishonest people.
And being real, the zero-day cheats are closely guarded and trickled out and sold for high prices as other cheats get found out, so for AAA games, the good cheats are priced out of comfort zone and anyone who attempts the lazy/cheap cheats is banned pretty quickly. A significant portion of the dishonest becomes honest through laziness or self-preservation. Only a select few are truly committed to dishonesty enough to put money and their accounts on the line.
Same way there are fewer murderers and thieves than there are non-murderers and non-thieves (at least in western countries).
No. The same way piracy has been diminished in the mainstream by years of lawsuits and jailtime against the loudest most available sources, the strongest anti-cheats have suppressed the easiest and cheapest paths to cheating on AAA games. Piracy hasn't gone away, but the number of people doing it peaked last decade.
Anti-cheat makers doesn't need to eliminate cheating completely, they just need to capture enough cheating (and ban unpredictably) that average people are mostly discouraged. As long as cheat-creators have to scurry around in secrecy and guard their implementations until the implementation is caught, the "good" cheats will never be a commodity on mainstream well-funded games with good anti-cheat.
Cheat-creators have to do the hard hacking and put their livelihoods on the line, they make kids pay up for that.
I ask because a lot of Canadians can't fathom having to worry about those sorts of bills, given that many employers don't offer great insurance, and especially if you happen to be between employers. Like how do you handle a sudden $20k bill that insurance won't cover?