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How to live on $432 a month in America

(shagbark.substack.com)
526 points cactusplant7374 | 1 comments | 23 May 25 16:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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stickfigure ◴[24 May 25 14:13 UTC] No.44081260[source]▶
On one hand I agree with the general premise of the article, which is that you can live a lot cheaper than you choose to. Homes in the passably-cute downtown of Massena are under $100k; you could live on $40k/yr comfortably and if you're here on HN you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job. Cutting it to $5k/yr is just trying to prove something.

The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper". It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it.

"Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.

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MarceColl ◴[24 May 25 14:22 UTC] No.44081319[source]▶
That's insane, my dad had cancer 3 years ago, and here in Spain we didn't even think about it (beyond of course the terrible situation). If you also want private insurance it will cost a youngish small family (like mine) 150EUR/month.
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1. hajile ◴[24 May 25 19:45 UTC] No.44083361[source]▶
The problem with US healthcare is bloat.

According to Google, person in Spain spends on average $4,432 per person per year with some $3,113 of that being paid by the government.

The US government pays out $6,000 per person per year or nearly TWICE as much.

The problem is that $6000 is still less than half of the $14,570 per person per year (2023) healthcare costs in the US.

And of course, the US government payments don't cover everyone equally. They only cover the elderly and some subset of the very poor (mostly kids).

The only fix is reducing US healthcare costs to something more like the rest of the world, but that requires sharing drug R&D costs evenly with other countries (raising your costs), reigning in insurance companies, eliminating over-credentializing of doctors and other medical professionals, fixing school cost/debt, and reducing/eliminating the massive amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy/paperwork (allowing doctors to reduce staff and see more patients per day which reduces overall medical costs).