In the US it is extremely expensive to be bipolar in the financial sense. I used to make a lot of money and over 10% of it went to bipolar annually. Now I live on a small income and I don't know what percent goes to bipolar but an estimate would be 25% roughly, if I didn't forget anything. That's before food, gas, anything. I am excluding dental and vision although dental is a significant expense for me. And it doesn't include anything to cover the large hospital bill from the summer and another one that is coming that will be probably more. I am going to have to beg for financial assistance after that or I'll be paying over 10% of my income just on that one bill. And my income is not big enough.

Obamacare didn't change anything for me so I can't speak about it. Our system still has some big holes and we all fall into them. We aren't being negative, it's just that it is a fact that our healthcare system still has a lot of problems. Some of those are due to work themselves out in the next several years. Others are just the way it is and hopefully someday someone can fix them although I doubt it right now. These are things like having a pretty large co-pay for Medicare admissions despite people on Medicae rarely having much money (my current situation). It goes on and on, but really the cost we are discussing is that it is tremendously expensive to deal with this illness and it can be very difficult financially no matter what you do to try to fight it.