Are you saying that a teacher’s insurance in 2007 New Mexico would have paid for whatever doctor the teacher wanted, for whatever treatment, anywhere in the world? His insurance would have paid for that?
I thought it was pretty clear in the show that they went to a doctor OUTSIDE their network, and hence their insurance wouldn’t pay for it.
The OP asked why Walt was poor, not why he didn’t have health insurance. Health insurance was not even implied to be an issue on this show until several episodes after he started cooking meth. And then, only in the senses that Walt chose to see a specialist that wasn’t covered, and that he had to hide where he got the money for that treatment from his wife. Health insurance was not the motivation for Walt to cook meth. That wasn’t stated, implied or hinted at.
He was having a midlife crisis and got supposedly terminal cancer to boot. That’s what motivated him to stop being the pushover schoolteacher and become the badass drug lord. He claimed at the beginning of the series that it was to provide for his family after he died, but we all know he did it for himself. He didn’t even tell his family he had cancer until after he started cooking meth, and then stubbornly maintained that he wasn’t seeking treatment at all. I don’t know where this “Vince Gilligan mishandled this plot point” business comes from. It wasn’t a plot point.
I think at the beginning it really was for his family. I remember him doing calculations out loud about how much he needed to stash away to keep the family in the black after he was gone. I won’t say anything else so as not to spoiler anything for the OP.
One might wonder why people shy away from Universal Healthcare, free at the point of use.
Maybe because it’s an incredibly complex issue with plenty of drawbacks.
They’ve proven it’s plausible by giving examples. All it takes is a single counterexample when someone saying something is impossible. You are discounting their experience because you continue to claim the situation is impossible. All it takes is the mere possibility to plug a plothole.
If you want to play the citation game, you are the one who has to bring citations establishing the lack of reality. It’s up to you to prove the plot hole exists, not up to us to prove it does not.
Demanding a nearly impossible level of citation to prove you wrong, when all you offered was your personal experience is ridiculous. Doing so when people have shown it wouldn’t matter even if you are right makes it seems like you have an ax to grind, and are setting the level so high only so you don’t have to change your mind.
I mean, what do we need to do, find someone who had a special needs kid in Albuquerque to prove it? It’s not like any insurance is going to advertize that they drop people. Insurance companies always overstate their coverage.
Doug showed he was in a place where, by your own logic, his special needs kid should have been covered, but he wasn’t. That should be enough.
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There are any number of readily-plausible fanwanks why Walt might be in a tight financial squeeze. Maybe he lost a lot in the dot-com bubble, for fuck’s sake.
I can’t resist chiming in. I work for Albuquerque Public Schools, and I started there in 2008 specifically for the health insurance benefits. As a fan of Breaking Bad from the beginning, I’ve given this more thought than it probably deserves.
In 2008, APS employees had a choice between a PPO plan or one of two HMOs. Neither one is anywhere close to free, although the district does cover more of the premiums than another employer might. Our family has two earners, so I have the luxury of devoting a great deal of my pay to insurance premiums. I know quite a few teachers who’ve chosen to buy less coverage because of the cost.
The coverage was (and is, although co-pays have gone up and there’s somewhat less choice in plans now) very good, but it’s far from “platinum”. It’s not terribly expensive, but there’s a choice between a “high” or “low” option, and I can understand where a teacher who’s providing his family’s sole income might go with the cheaper plan, which means he’d have higher co-pays (or deductible, for the PPO option). No version of either plan would cover an out-of-network specialist or a non-approved cancer treatment.
Perhaps more to the point, the standard life insurance isn’t lavish unless you bump it up and pay extra, something a middle-aged teacher might not have considered a necessity when he made his choices the October before he was diagnosed with cancer.
I love how where the title itself requests no spoilers, the thread is riddled with spoilers. Hopefully the OP has bowed out by now. I wouldn’t blame him if he bailed completely.
Are you questioning the logic of the great Vince Gilligan? Apostacy is a crime punishable by death in some parts you know…:mad:
You don’t have much of a grasp on logic if you think he is suggesting his situation is representative of the norm. You claimed it was implausible. He demonstrated that it is not implausible. The end. At this point, you should be saying “oops, maybe I was wrong” or something rather than trying to win the internet by misrepresenting his statements.
He announced his bailitude in post 8.
Ah, gotcha. Sorry, I got distracted by AB’s giant walls of text. (Not that I read them, mind you, just got distracted by them.)
What this thread seems to lack a grasp on is the matter of opinion… we are not discussing teacher compensation per se here. We are discussing the fictional portrayal of a character’s motivations that turns in large part on the vaguely-sketched claim that he has such poor health insurance that OOP treatment is his only option.
In my opinion based on my fairly broad experience, this is nonsense - faint handwaving by the showrunner and writers because they were more interested in other details, and we’re not supposed to pay attention to that one. (More to the point, I find it irritating because they make it an “everyone knows” bit of nonsense and put no real thought or consideration into establishing the point.)
Did I say all teachers have wonderful health insurance? I did not. Did I ignore that there are those who have spoken up with contrary statements about their experiences? I did not. I said that I found it implausible and sloppy.
I’ll just add that a lifetime among school and gummint workers has given me a low opinion of their judgment of benefit levels. I have heard them scream bloody murder when negotiations or cutbacks take their coverage down from top-tier levels to, oh my dear god, something close to what those people in the private sector get as a matter of course. I have sat across the table from relatives and family friends who spewed bitter venom because their essentially unlimited coverage now required five-dollar co-pays for doctor visits. The smug, shielded entitlement factor is often turned up to 11… so excuse me if what school system employees insist is indifferent, expensive coverage is something “private sector” employees either pay far higher rates for or cannot get at all. As an employer, we provided top-tier plans at zero to nominal cost… but by 2008-9, we simply could not get those plans any more, at any cost, even absurdly inflated ones. In 2011-12, I participated in discussions for our local school district, who refused to budge on the district providing such traditional coverage even though the cost was coming close to exceeding actual salary costs… they were entitled to it, gahdammit, even though it had essentially ceased to exist.
Sorry for expressing my opinion in a TV-show thread, though.
Stupid Americans…go single-payer already to preserve our precious TV-show analyses!
I seem to recall that [spoiler]Walter’s wealthy friends offered the recommendation of the out-of-network specialist for Walt’s untreatable cancer and also offered to pay. Skyler was present, so Walt couldn’t really refuse. He had a conflicted relationship with that couple in the areas of love and money.
Walter initially wanted to leave his family some $700,000. But he kept losing the money as he also began to really enjoy the game.
At the end, he confessed to Skyler in her dumpy apartment that he ‘did it for himself’. He had started to say “Everything I did…” which usually ended with “I did for my family.” Skyler cut him off mid sentence to tell him she didn’t want to hear that again, and this time he said he did it for himself.
He was proud of what he created (even though it was a lot of chaos and damage) as shown when he toured the warehouse lab admiring the equipment right before he died.
In the end, he did not take care of his family.[/spoiler]
Thanks for not spoiling how the whole series ended 
Or did he?
Financially, the two best hitmen west of the Mississippi will be ensuring a big payday for the White family.