It means you're paying for insurance ... that helps after you've coughed up $6K.
Which is useful to very few.
There simply is no way to make it work where people get unlimited “free” care. That economic model doesn’t work for any other product/consumer. What makes people think it can work for the US in health care? Even an entity with supposedly unlimited money printing capability, aka the US government, can’t print enough money to pay for “free” care for every American.
The problem is, some people get more than they would if they had to actually work for it, so those people vote for the freebies. They don’t realize or don’t care that they’re living off the work/efforts (taxes) of others, or that they are giving up liberty and an opportunity for something much better for a handout.
When we say democracy is two lions and a lamb voting over what’s for dinner, that’s literally a truism. Sadly, the lions in America are starting to outnumber the lambs. Worse, our political class wants to import even more lions as a means to hang onto power forever. It works...until it doesn’t.
There really is no such thing as a free ride, but I think Americans are going to have to see it all come apart before they’ll believe it. Either that or we’ll have a totalitarian system like Venezuela where I hear buying toilet paper is getting to be a bit of a challenge. Everyone will have “free” care, but we’ll have to queue up for an aspirin. Yeah, it can happen here, too.