Ironically, living in Germany makes me scared that I won't be able to pay for a therapy by someone like Dr. Nagourney as our governmental health insurance providers are very eccentric when it comes to paying for treatments.
That combined with my high tax-rate and only slightly above average salary means I won't be able to save enough money to afford it to send a loved one to him when it becomes necessary. That is crazy scary to me.
A programmer from close to my area had to publicly raise funds (~350k iirc) to send his 2 year old son to the US for a surgery that saved his life, but which no hospital in Germany dared to perform.[1]
I'm a developer who has been living for 4+ years in Germany. Does that mean that it is a good idea to perhaps change to private insurance?
I thought that when I get old here, as I pay all those fucking taxes, I would get a good treatment for whatever diseases I may have until it's my last day.
I think the OP is confusing a few things here. Public health insurance will always pay for whatever treatment you need. Age is only a factor in very few cases. What matters is that the doctor or hospital is also in Germany. The system allows you a huge amount of freedom in choosing who to get care from. But the system doesn't cover getting care from foreign facilities. Private health insurance policies have the same restriction.
I don't get much freedom when it comes to international healthcare and won't be able to save enough to pay out of pocket/take a loan for something as dramatic as this. The only insurance answer to this is a Dread Disease insurance which pays out once specific illnesses appear, but the amount and illnesses are completely dependent on your financials aswell, so you're still worse off in this case compared to simply earning more in the US.
It's great that I don't have to fear going to the hospital for normal stuff, but everything extraordinary is very scary as our public healthcare system is simply crumbling, getting appointments for specialists can take months, hospitals are overcrowded (my mother was taken by an ambulance to a hospital due to a heart condition, only to be ferried further as all beds were full that night) and doctors and nurses are working themselves to the bone or simply leave the country outright.
I don’t know about the German insurance, but for example the Swiss insurance makes a specific exception: in case there is no adequate treatment or expertise available within Swiss borders, the insurance must cover a foreign treatment.
Sadly, as shown in my linked case, that isn't the case here.
The boy would most likely have died if his parents didn't publicly raise the funds themselves and pursued the therapy in the US.
> What matters is that the doctor or hospital is also in Germany.
Given that ~90% of cancer research is funded in the United States [0], that might work for established therapies but anything on the cutting edge might be hard to get?
Well the private insurance is indeed a problem if the insured cohort gets old, i.e., all the clients that signed up for a certain insurance product in around the same time frame, and when it is cheapest: mostly at age 25-40. After a while, the clients get older and the product becomes more expensive for the clients, and won’t attract new clients anymore. Then, all remaining clients become old „together“, hence the old aged themselves need to share ever raising costs.
That combined with my high tax-rate and only slightly above average salary means I won't be able to save enough money to afford it to send a loved one to him when it becomes necessary. That is crazy scary to me.
A programmer from close to my area had to publicly raise funds (~350k iirc) to send his 2 year old son to the US for a surgery that saved his life, but which no hospital in Germany dared to perform.[1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/hilf.david/