Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh
A friend of mine (now living/working in Winchester) was a British Citizen with a Green Card, married to a US citizen, working as a CIO in the USA with a NASDAQ company, with a great company medical insurance, but when he was diagnosed with MS, he had to come back to this country, as even with his top of the range package, his co-pay would be $50-70k per year, and that didn't include the limits of payments (so if his treatment went over $500k per year (and it was likely to), he would have to pay the top up (probably around $200k per year)).
He gets it all for free here in the UK, but it split up his marriage, as his wife was a Senior Exec in a Silicon Valley company, and she couldn't be based in the UK (they're still friends, and see each other once or twice a year).
|
You hear those kind of stories a lot. People who've done everything right, who've saved and done well for themselves who are still one incident away from being close to disaster. No matter how much you save few can handle bills of $200k a year.
Student loans and healthcare completely ruin people's finances and in turn their lives in the US in a way neither does here. I really like America but they still seem extraordinarily callous in policy sometimes.