I pay my own way, always have. Still do. Course I have terrible problems with confirmation bias too.
While working, for 55 years, I bought health “endurance” insurance. I paid enough for said insurance that the executives and the stock holders of the insurance company made money, after paying any medical expenditures in my behalf. All the while, my employer and I paid for a government owned (government being all of us) health insurance escrow account program, for that same 55 year period. We (government) used that money to keep the country afloat besides building my health benefits account for when I become unemployable due to my age and physical condition, ground down from working so hard to pay for both my active private health insurance premiums and my Fed “deferred” health insurance mandates.
When I became 65 the Federal government started reimbursing me for the payments my employer and I had made into “own” government retirement fund, but not before deducting a monthly health benefit premium, that increases every year, based on national inflation rates. Besides that, because our government health insurance can’t afford to pay for all of my medical expenses, because they have and continue to spend it on “social infrastructure” I have to pay for another premium to cover both the deficiency in “our” government’s health insurance as well as my drug prescriptions. Then when I go to a drug store to buy my Paxil so I don’t go clear crazy from secondary anxiety, from being a hundred pounds over weighed, over weigh caused from over eating caused by primary anxiety, caused by multiple long term exposure to health insurance premiums and low credit rating based on late payments to medical clinics, doctors, hospitals and physical therapists, not to mention my psychiatrist who is a out of service provider who I pay a deductible of $45 twice a week, I pay the druggist another deductible.
Currently, with all my and my wife’s health insurance premiums, our deductibles and out of service expenses we average out of pocket, give or take $700 a month. That does not include the payments that’s get paid by “our” Medicare account that we paid into every day we got a payroll check for the 55 years we paid into it.
So ya, I pay for my meds out of my own pocket. At least …… my bias tells me I do.