Work life balance in the USA

Pkiernan

arctictree wrote: »

What happens in the US if you can't or just won't pay the bill?

The IRS comes after you.

arctictree

Pkiernan wrote: »

The IRS comes after you.

Really? The tax man comes after you if you don't pay your hospital bill? Rough.

NSAman

arctictree wrote: »

Really? The tax man comes after you if you don't pay your hospital bill? Rough.

If you have insurance you are **** out of luck.....

HOWEVER....

If you do NOT have insurance you can negotiate with the hospital on the price of the stay.

Anecdote here....

I went into Hospital BEFORE I had Insurance. Total Cost $500. Same issue post Insurance around $6000.

The tax man does NOT come after you...sheezzz... the hospital will follow you. if attempt at payment is made, normally nothing happens. Bill collector agency is brought in and everyone ignores them... ahem..;)

dresden8

Invidious wrote: »

You're missing the point.

Someone is complaining that the millennial generation owns a small proportion of the wealth and the boomer generation owns far more.

Well, logically the boomer generation (currently in their 60s and 70s) will eventually pass on, leaving their wealth to younger millennials ... and eventually the next generation will be complaining that millennials own all the wealth.

It's a pointless argument, really, complaining that young people in their 20s and 30s don't own as much wealth as their parents.

And if you are not in a position to inherit? I am amazed by how many people think every child in the country is going to inherit a cool mill from dear old dad.

If you don't have an inheritance you cannot work your way out of poverty? That's a good thing?

walshtipp

dresden8 wrote: »

And if you are not in a position to inherit? I am amazed by how many people think every child in the country is going to inherit a cool mill from dear old dad.

If you don't have an inheritance you cannot work your way out of poverty? That's a good thing?

I would say the majority of people will not inherit anything substantial from their parents. But anyone can find a way out of a poor situation with hard work and dedication.

Invidious

dresden8 wrote: »

And if you are not in a position to inherit? I am amazed by how many people think every child in the country is going to inherit a cool mill from dear old dad.

My point was that much of boomers' wealth will eventually pass to the millennial generation ... because what else is going to happen to it?

That, of course, doesn't mean that every millennial will inherit $1 million.

jmayo

SharpshooterTom wrote: »

I'm a qualified electrical engineer but I quit the job a while back being a carer for my parents and I'm now considering changing career (so this potential move isn't imminent and a while off yet, but I'm thinking long term about it).



The thing is its really my only gripe because I'm personally ok with healthcare and gun culture (most of the murders take place in crap parts of the major cities), or at least they don't bother me.
.

The shootings I would be more concerned about are the mass ones that go down.

JustAThought wrote: »

Y well you don’t have to eat out 7 days a week. Only I guess in Amedica the food is so varied, reasonably priced and attractive that you can afford to. Unlike here. Where we also mostly tip.

Some of the food in America is absolute shyte.
Yeah you get big steaks, but it is all force fed feedlot reared beef.

Now you may live in some big city like NY or San Fran, but a lot America is just restaurant chains (using restaurant term here loosely) offering the same shyte throughout the country.

JustAThought wrote:

And massive in America is something else.

...
I’d love to see the gaurds policing the streets here, or taking criminals to task. or arresting half I’Connell St for drug dealing or defecating or shooting up on the footpath. I guess thats why so many of American towns and main thoroughfares are so clean, feel safe and are
pleasant places to be. Unlike the dark hole that is much of Dublin city centre.

Where do you live Beverly Hills because your description reminds me of Beverly Hills Cop.
Listening to your description one would never think that the US has been fighting a drugs war for decades and it is the biggest destination for drugs in the world.
Grant wherever you are lucky enough to live is probably very starchy, clean and the local police keep the riff raff out.
But that is not huge parts of the US.

Interesting place to visit, great if you want to drive muscle cars, shoot military grade weapons, absolutely brilliant for general aviation, but to live in full time no thanks.

I don't particularly want to live in a country where nearly half the electorate voted for a moronic halfwit as their leader and even worse a fair chunk of them think that he actually won the election he lost simply because he says so.
Also don't want to live in country where most of the halfwits that voted for the halfwit think they have right to own any amount of weaponry and that science is the work of the devil.

Manic Moran

salonfire wrote: »

Also comes down to your luck. Fall on hard times where you lose your Health Insurance, would you 'enjoy' the US then? If you had an accident and they took you to a out-of-network hospital, would you enjoy the bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, but the doctor is out-of-network, would you enjoy that bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, use an in-network doctor but an out-of-network lab, would you enjoy that bill?

Would you enjoy running for cover as a shooter opens up in a mall or school? Or enjoy living with that risk every day?

We seem to be managing so far with minimizing the fear of loss of health insurance, out of network doctors (which the insurance company took care of for us anyway, and a law has been changed to prevent such surprises in the future), and I cannot say I have expended many brain cells worrying about a school shooting than I have about being involved in the next Bataclan attack every time I go to Paris (Besides, I can shoot back in the US).

I would think, though, that if you are living your life worried about all the things which can go wrong, I might wonder how much of your life you leave for 'enjoyment'. I mean, you can get hit by a car the second you walk out your door... if your house doesn't burn down when you're asleep before you wake up to get out the door.

great if you want to drive muscle cars, shoot military grade weapons, absolutely brilliant for general aviation, but to live in full time no thanks.

You've just listed half my hobbies. I own three V8s, plenty of firearms and have a private pilot's certificate. So far, so good. Just as well I'm the one living here full time and not you, then.

FatherTed

salonfire wrote: »

Also comes down to your luck. Fall on hard times where you lose your Health Insurance, would you 'enjoy' the US then? If you had an accident and they took you to a out-of-network hospital, would you enjoy the bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, but the doctor is out-of-network, would you enjoy that bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, use an in-network doctor but an out-of-network lab, would you enjoy that bill?

Would you enjoy running for cover as a shooter opens up in a mall or school? Or enjoy living with that risk every day?

Been in the US Over 25 years and never been at a mall during a shooting. Also I wonder how my kids made it all the way to college with no injuries from guns. Maybe I’ve just been lucky :rolleyes:

Invidious

salonfire wrote: »

Would you enjoy running for cover as a shooter opens up in a mall or school? Or enjoy living with that risk every day?

Over the past 20 years, more American children have died from lightning strikes than from school shootings. Children are ten times as likely to die in a traffic accident on their way to school as they are to die inside the school.

salonfire

Invidious wrote: »

Over the past 20 years, more American children have died from lightning strikes than from school shootings. Children are ten times as likely to die in a traffic accident on their way to school as they are to die inside the school.

Hope your not trying to use that as a defence, considering the carnage on the roads there!

Shocking level of driver training where 16year olds are let loose, no testing of cars so rust-buckets are free to continue driving around.

Car dominated cities where walkers have to cross a 4 lane highway to cross from one side of the street to another.

Insanely high-speed interstates congested by fast moving HGVs mean fiery wrecks are not uncommon or getting yourself in a truckers sandwich in one of the many pileups.

Invidious

salonfire wrote: »

Hope your not trying to use that as a defence, considering the carnage on the roads there!

Shocking level of driver training where 16year olds are let loose, no testing of cars so rust-buckets are free to continue driving around.

Car dominated cities where walkers have to cross a 4 lane highway to cross from one side of the street to another.

Insanely high-speed interstates congested by fast moving HGVs mean fiery wrecks are not uncommon or getting yourself in a truckers sandwich in one of the many pileups.

It's amazing there's anyone left alive over there at all.

NSAman

[QUOTE=salonfire;[/QUOTE]
Insanely high-speed interstates congested by fast moving HGVs mean fiery wrecks are not uncommon or getting yourself in a truckers sandwich in one of the many pileups.[/QUOTE]

65 miles per hour is the average interstate speed limit...for the most part. Ireland is 120 kmph or 74mph?

Manic Moran

Manic Moran wrote: »

I own three V8s, plenty of firearms and have a private pilot's certificate.

Dat's what I'm talking about.

salonfire

salonfire wrote: »

Hope your not trying to use that as a defence, considering the carnage on the roads there!

Shocking level of driver training where 16year olds are let loose, no testing of cars so rust-buckets are free to continue driving around.

Car dominated cities where walkers have to cross a 4 lane highway to cross from one side of the street to another.

Insanely high-speed interstates congested by fast moving HGVs mean fiery wrecks are not uncommon or getting yourself in a truckers sandwich in one of the many pileups.

Still, sure beats the hell out of being locked up for months on end like we are here ! Get busy living or get busy dying.

Palmy

salonfire wrote: »

Also comes down to your luck. Fall on hard times where you lose your Health Insurance, would you 'enjoy' the US then? If you had an accident and they took you to a out-of-network hospital, would you enjoy the bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, but the doctor is out-of-network, would you enjoy that bill?

They take you to an in-network hospital, use an in-network doctor but an out-of-network lab, would you enjoy that bill?

Would you enjoy running for cover as a shooter opens up in a mall or school? Or enjoy living with that risk every day?

Simple pay $10 a month for the rest of your life. If you make an effort to pay they can not do anything. Hospitals actually right off debt every year and get compensation form the government for unpaid medical bills. I personally work with people who have had $40k + hospital bills and pay minimal a month,

Palmy

jmayo wrote: »

The shootings I would be more concerned about are the mass ones that go down.



Some of the food in America is absolute shyte.
Yeah you get big steaks, but it is all force fed feedlot reared beef.

Now you may live in some big city like NY or San Fran, but a lot America is just restaurant chains (using restaurant term here loosely) offering the same shyte throughout the country.



Where do you live Beverly Hills because your description reminds me of Beverly Hills Cop.
Listening to your description one would never think that the US has been fighting a drugs war for decades and it is the biggest destination for drugs in the world.
Grant wherever you are lucky enough to live is probably very starchy, clean and the local police keep the riff raff out.
But that is not huge parts of the US.

Interesting place to visit, great if you want to drive muscle cars, shoot military grade weapons, absolutely brilliant for general aviation, but to live in full time no thanks.

I don't particularly want to live in a country where nearly half the electorate voted for a moronic halfwit as their leader and even worse a fair chunk of them think that he actually won the election he lost simply because he says so.
Also don't want to live in country where most of the halfwits that voted for the halfwit think they have right to own any amount of weaponry and that science is the work of the devil.

The big difference in the States is they don’t have housing estates in every suburb like Ireland.
Dublin you have nice areas like Blackrock and Castleknock and you have low income housing stuck in the middle of it. Not saying it is not right but in the states if you live in a middle class area that is exactly what it is. You have to travel to another area of a city to go into low income housing. This is how they police it here. They can concentrate on an area and police it . A lot of other countries are similar to this like New Zealand and Australia.

Palmy

Palmy wrote: »

The big difference in the States is they don’t have housing estates in every suburb like Ireland.
Dublin you have nice areas like Blackrock and Castleknock and you have low income housing stuck in the middle of it. Not saying it is not right but in the states if you live in a middle class area that is exactly what it is. You have to travel to another area of a city to go into low income housing. This is how they police it here. They can concentrate on an area and police it . A lot of other countries are similar to this like New Zealand and Australia.

Plus I agree here I can shoot back. I feel safer here than i ever did walking down O’Connell or Parnell street in Dublin after dark.

salonfire

Palmy wrote: »

Simple pay $10 a month for the rest of your life. If you make an effort to pay they can not do anything. Hospitals actually right off debt every year and get compensation form the government for unpaid medical bills. I personally work with people who have had $40k + hospital bills and pay minimal a month,

Genius!! All those bankruptcy lawyers will have to change career now I guess that you have outwitted them all!

No longer will medical bills be the leading reason for bankruptcy in the US.

Palmy

salonfire wrote: »

Genius!! All those bankruptcy lawyers will have to change career now I guess that you have outwitted them all!

No longer will medical bills be the leading reason for bankruptcy in the US.

Nothing to do with outwitting anyone it’s perfectly legal. Pay only what you can afford it’s that simple. As long as you are paying something legally they can not do anything to make you pay more. Where people get into trouble is when they do not pay anything and it goes to a Dept collector and they dodge it for years. Then your screwed.

L1011

Palmy wrote: »

Nothing to do with outwitting anyone it’s perfectly legal. Pay only what you can afford it’s that simple. As long as you are paying something legally they can not do anything to make you pay more. Where people get into trouble is when they do not pay anything and it goes to a Dept collector and they dodge it for years. Then your screwed.

With the medical debt over you, you aren't going to get a credit card, a car loan, a mortgage, a hire purchase agreement, etc etc - you won't even get a bill pay phone.

Palmy

L1011 wrote: »

With the medical debt over you, you aren't going to get a credit card, a car loan, a mortgage, a hire purchase agreement, etc etc - you won't even get a bill pay phone.

Well I already have all that so I’m good. So those people with student loans in the hundreds of thousands don’t get any of that either? It’s all about loan to debt ratio here and what your monthly income vs cost of what you owe.
If your student loan cost you $500 a month when you owe $100k they take the $500 dollars into consideration not the total of loan and years.

L1011

Palmy wrote: »

Well I already have all that so I’m good. So those people with student loans in the hundreds of thousands don’t get any of that either?

If you can afford to live your life without ever needing any form of credit ever, you can afford health insurance or afford paying more than a tenner a week. Normal people are going to need some form of credit agreement. Want to pay your car insurance monthly? That's a credit agreement. And so on.

Student loans which are being serviced make your credit score better. Medical bills being paid on the never never drag it to the ditch.

Palmy

L1011 wrote: »

If you can afford to live your life without ever needing any form of credit ever, you can afford health insurance or afford paying more than a tenner a week. Normal people are going to need some form of credit agreement. Want to pay your car insurance monthly? That's a credit agreement. And so on.

Student loans which are being serviced make your credit score better. Medical bills being paid on the never never drag it to the ditch.

Never had a credit agreement here for car insurance paying monthly.

L1011

Palmy wrote: »

Never had a credit agreement here for car insurance paying monthly.

Can guarantee you actually do (invisibly, just as in Ireland, but its in your small print); and that your credit score was run. You would be told to pay up front if you had too low a score.

If you can afford a years car insurance up front, you aren't going to be in your imaginary tenner a week payment setup (and will probably have health insurance...). That's why people go bankrupt to clear it and try get on with their lives.

Palmy

L1011 wrote: »

Can guarantee you actually do (invisibly, just as in Ireland, but its in your small print); and that your credit score was run. You would be told to pay up front if you had too low a score.

If you can afford a years car insurance up front, you aren't going to be in your imaginary tenner a week payment setup (and will probably have health insurance...). That's why people go bankrupt to clear it and try get on with their lives.

Have to agree with you on the bankruptcy, it’s nothing to do that here. You can buy a house three years after being bankrupt and most of Americans see it as nothing of a big deal to claim bankruptcy. What I am saying is if you can legally afford $10 a week they will not chase you for more. That’s all I am saying. Personally I have medical insurance and would never want to be in that situation but people here have the mentality if they don’t have insurance to pay a minimal amount or claim bankruptcy.

NSAman

L1011 wrote: »

Can guarantee you actually do (invisibly, just as in Ireland, but its in your small print); and that your credit score was run. You would be told to pay up front if you had too low a score.

If you can afford a years car insurance up front, you aren't going to be in your imaginary tenner a week payment setup (and will probably have health insurance...). That's why people go bankrupt to clear it and try get on with their lives.

As Palmy said, pay a basic amount not much they can do.

Bankruptcy is not the same stigma here as in Ireland.

Spending habits here, still to this day amaze me. I’m a saver, always have been. Friends are not, fantastic lifestyles and all the latest cars, boats, holidays, homes etc. When this pandemic started, many were in trouble with the downturn in business. Shopping is king ( I hate shopping) the same as Ireland. I invest some savings in property for my retirement and also as a dig out to staff and family.

The spend-free lifestyle of many in the States, is very evident, even people who have little. Fine in the good times, not so good in the bad times.

chrissb8

Invidious wrote: »

Over the past 20 years, more American children have died from lightning strikes than from school shootings. Children are ten times as likely to die in a traffic accident on their way to school as they are to die inside the school.

The fact that this is even a statistic says it all. Also, where did you pull that fact from? I did a quick google and nothing at all is coming up. Is this one of those world-famous American facts that have been pulled out of the rear end?

Manic Moran

chrissb8 wrote: »

The fact that this is even a statistic says it all. Also, where did you pull that fact from? I did a quick google and nothing at all is coming up. Is this one of those world-famous American facts that have been pulled out of the rear end?

I can believe the traffic accident statistic, but I looked up the lightning figures. A quick Google brought me to the National Weather Service https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/ which splits up lightning deaths by age by year. The catch is that they are split up into groups of ten years, so 19-year-olds are counted in the 10-19 age group.

Anyway, over the last 20 years for which there are figures (1999-2019) 124 people aged 0-19 have been killed by lightning, an average of 6.2/year.

Interestingly, it seems much harder to find a figure for "children killed in school shooting" over the same period.

CNN's K-12 tracker article from last year https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/07/us/ten-years-of-school-shootings-trnd/ shows from 2009 to 2018, 5, 4, 3, 31, 6, 12, 3, 5, 8, 37, and to fill in for 2019, NBC's tracker shows 5 (But it includes universities) making the ten-year-total 114. So, although the number of deaths at schools is far higher than the number of deaths of children by lightning, we still have the quesiton of "how many of those K-12 shootings were of adults" (For example, three from Parkland or seven at Sandy Hook). It also leaves open the question of "what about the previous ten years". However, looking up "Deadliest school shootings since Columbine", it seems that in the period 2000 and on, only two school shootings had notable death tolls, Red Lake Senior High in 2005 (5 children dead) and and Nickel Mines High School in 2006 (Also 5 children killed). If those were the 'highs' of the years, the idea that more children have been killed by lighting than in school shootings in the last 20 years (Columbine being more than 20 years ago) is feasible. After all, seven of the last ten years, fewer people have been shot and killed on school grounds in school shootings (Adults and children both) than the average of people killed by lightining.

It has been over a year (378 days) since the last school shooting, according to NBC's tracker, though, granted, the fact that schools have been closed for 2/3 of the year probably has something to do with that. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/school-shooting-tracker-n969951#year=2020

Palmy

NSAman wrote: »

As Palmy said, pay a basic amount not much they can do.

Bankruptcy is not the same stigma here as in Ireland.

Spending habits here, still to this day amaze me. I’m a saver, always have been. Friends are not, fantastic lifestyles and all the latest cars, boats, holidays, homes etc. When this pandemic started, many were in trouble with the downturn in business. Shopping is king ( I hate shopping) the same as Ireland. I invest some savings in property for my retirement and also as a dig out to staff and family.

The spend-free lifestyle of many in the States, is very evident, even people who have little. Fine in the good times, not so good in the bad times.

I have to agree with you on spending habits. I work with a lot of people who own a house and drop $50-$60k on a brand new pickup truck without blinking an eyelid, all while earning $40k a year. It blows my mind here how they do not like to buy a second hand vehicle it has to be new. Meanwhile I pick up a three year old car that retails for $60k and pick it up for under $20k.