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Over half of Americans say they're not even close to financial freedom
(scrippsnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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That's a good point. I make well into the 6-digits and the one reason I don't believe that anyone under 7-digits will ever be "financially free" is because of the for-profit healthcare system. One bad accident or cancer and I'm fucked for a long time if not the rest of my life as is anyone that can't just shrug off 5 to 6-digit bills.
Now if I were somewhere that offered universal health care and I was making what I was, I'd consider myself to be financially free. So I guess I fall into the 46.2% category.
Same. I'm financially stable. Meaning I can hit a few bumps and I'll be fine. But I don't think it's possible to be ' financially free' when at any time I could suddenly have hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt.
I can roughly estimate potential pit falls with my home. And home insurance is reasonably reliable for catastrophic scenarios. Even if they aren't, bankruptcy is still feasible. The same cannot be said about healthcare. Insurance plans are extremely opaque and while they claim to have terms such as 'out of pocket maximum' that should**** in theory limit your losses, there are endless stories about how little that holds up when put to the test.
Proper healthcare coverage would be the single biggest impact on American stability. Nothing else is even close.
You can add disability to this. If I can't work I pretty sure im buggered even if for some reason we get universal healthcare (I guess being disabled, if you can navigate to the point of getting it, you would have medicaid but what comes in every month would not be adequate to stay where I live or such)