scott wrote:
>> But it's often the case that young healthy people will buy (say) only 
>> catastrophic health insurance (covering costs >$5000 perhaps),
> 
> That makes sense, I've not seen anything like that in Europe, 

I'm not surprised. :-)

> OOC what do pregnant women do?  Surely they must rack up a fair amount 
> of cost with all the visits to the doctor and hospital?  Do they pay for 
> this themselves?

I've never been pregnant.  Some things are covered, some things aren't.

> Ah I see, surely having emergency rooms at hospitals is a fairly 
> fundamental thing for a developed country to have, shouldn't the 
> government be at least partly funding the operation of these to make 
> sure everyone has one within a certain time/distance?  Non-urgent 
> operations and other minor stuff are a different matter.

One would think, yes. In this case, insurance and health care are unrelated, 
so it's not getting discussed.

> Oh ok, so if it's being paid by your employer you can't ever change 
> jobs...hmmmm.

Basically, yes. Sucks. I think part of that is being worked on. Since I knew 
people in that situation, I think laws were passed saying that if you were 
previously covered for it within X months ago, it can't be considered a 
pre-existing condition. One even gets paperwork now when leaving a job 
saying one was covered up until a particular date.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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