I’d like to know other non-US citizen’s opinions on your health care system are when you read a story like this. I know there are worse places in the world to receive health care, and better. What runs through your heads when you have a medical emergency?
A little background on my question:
My son was having trouble breathing after having a cold for a couple of days and we needed to stop and take the time to see if our insurance would be accepted at the closest emergency room so we didn’t end up with a huge bill (like 2000$-5000$). This was a pretty involved ~10 minute process of logging into our insurance carrier, and unsuccessfully finding the answer there. Then calling the hospital and having them tell us to look it up by scrolling through some links using the local search tool on their website. This gave me some serious pause, what if it was a real emergency, like the kind where you have no time to call and see if the closest hospital takes your insurance.
what do you think when you read stories like these
Honestly they are so fucking sad I try to avoid reading them. Another example is this one: She Was Denied an Abortion After Roe Fell. This Is a Year in Her Family’s Life.
The monsters have been trying to do the same things in Europe though, UK has underfunded the NHS and healthcare in Germany is in deliberate decline too.
I saw a tiktok recently with an american explaining that people just don’t finish the course of antibiotics so they have an emergency stash. FACEPALM.
You think this is fucked. My son is type 1 diabetic here (Canada). In America people routinely ration insulin because of the cost
For those not in the know, a diabetic needs insulin constantly to survive. Failure to meet this requirement introduces a laundry list of complications that all end in death.
Despite this, they play Russian roulette with their lives not because they want to but because their government does not care about them.
It’s infuriating.
Also, worth noting that if you’re in the know, red Cross has deployed in America multiple times in recent memory. Something that used to be for “3rd world” countries deployed in the richest country in the world.
America is a failed state. People continue argue over the semantics of that definition but I will continue to argue it’s justified.
Back in the day I had a friend who ran essentially a fish dispensary and had a good connection on quality fish antibiotics. I would stock up on a bunch of stuff whenever they were making an order.
My numbers are surely off but I was paying something like $5 for ~500 amoxacillan, where at a rite aid or CVS you’d be paying, what $50 for 14 pills. The same ingredients, the same markings, the same thing. Just a lot cheaper for fish.
Isn’t that how antibiotic resistance develops?
It is that pesky 99.9% effectiveness. That 0.1% that survived did so because they had some minor resistance. Rinse and repeat a few hundred thousand times and you have forced evolution. It doesn’t even take that long to happen in a population with the over-prescription rate we have had here. Something about the people in charge being undereducated religious ideologs who see expertise as a threat or fraud because experts make mistakes and learn from them.
Not really. Antibiotic resistance is mostly a thing due to how over prescribed it is, not from an extreme minority of idiots not finishing their dose
The one thing even Americans who have health insurance don’t realize about single payer healthcare systems, is that we don’t worry about it.
We don’t consider it when switching jobs, we don’t think about it when we’re sick, we don’t worry about medical bills… we just go to the doctor/hospital, and worry about getting better or dealing with the work implications of taking time off.
The weight for that piece simply doesn’t rest on our shoulders or minds at all.
You’ve been tricked and brainwashed you into thinking what you have is normal, and it’s disturbing how many of you think it’s a reasonable way to continue.
I’m American and trust me, in no way does it feel normal even after living with it my whole life. Simply hearing what you describe - not thinking about it - feels so deeply right and reasonable that it reminds me just how much weight of “this is not normal” we carry around.
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Sadly, the brainwashing has been so effective that those who buy it never noticed that those gaslighting people into believing that no government system (eg, single payer) could ever work are the ones (Republicans) doing their best to ensure that government remains as broken as possible.
More people believe that our system is fucked than those who think this kind of system is normal.
We’re just faced with so many hurdles, gerrymandering, red states that exist only because of minority representation have more power over larger population areas (districts by size and not population, electoral college) … The majority of the country is merely surviving and the apathy sets in. I remind people that voting fascists out is the only way things are going to change and often the response is “Well, I tried that once and it didn’t work.” So they stop showing up to vote. Or they buy into the ‘both sides’ BS and post lame memes on Facebook and Reddit.
A lot of us really are painfully aware of how fucked it is.
That’s so fucking crazy sounding. It also sounds wonderful. My parents almost lost our house due to medical expenses, and yes they had insurance (here’s the best part - my dad was a disabled veteran). So support the troops, yay!
Because of that experience, I’ve developed a lifelong almost PTSD about insurance and medical bills - afraid that it will happen again to me now that I’m an adult. I obsess over it. It’s terrible.
I’m so jealous of those who never have to give it a second thought.
1 in 4 bankruptcies are military due to medical cost. We only support troops with thoughts and prayers
That’s so fucking crazy sounding
And there’s the problem
It’s so fucking normal sounding. Your system is the crazy, horrifying human rights abuse 😅
This is why I don’t understand why corporations aren’t behind it. It would take an enormous load of my HR dept. It would save them so much.
Corps actually benefit from workers being worried about leaving. It reduces labour costs.
We moved from America to see Asia years ago. We were just talking last week about how racist we still catch ourselves being. We have a sick relative at home who we talked about moving here. They’d be close to us so we could help. And healthcare here is cheap/free often and pretty good.
But there’s part of me that just thinks American = superior. No matter how long I live here I’m not sure it will ever go away. It’s been psychopathically programmed into me. “Yeah it’s expensive, but at least you’re getting a good doctor”. (I’ve had awful and great doctors in both countries) It’s infuriating to realize.
Good on you for realising though. I mean from an outsiders perspective America tends to push the exceptionalism narrative pretty hard, live there long enough and it’ll get into you sooner or later.
You were conditioned, you’re not being racist. It would be racist if, say, you lived in the US and had an Asian doctor and demanded a white one.
Also:
it’s been psychopathically programmed into me
This really made me laugh. It’s hard to describe what I’m imagining, but, remember in the first matrix where they “download” information via needle in the back of the head? And you know how a video game character looks when the game is glitching? Like, one character is just freaking out, all of their animations happening at once? Kinda like two cartoon characters fighting in a cloud of smoke and limbs and heads just flying out random places? Well, I imagined a mixture of those two (three?) things. And dammit if I didn’t get a hearty chuckle out of it.
I’m from the US, and I moved to Canada for 4 years for work. As a young adults, my partner and I had revolving medical debt. Not a ton, but enough to make it annoying. A couple thousand here and there. It felt like I was always had a hospital bill that we were trying to pay off. When we moved to Canada it was weird for us because, just as another person in here stated, you just didn’t have to think about going to the doctor. I had major stomach surgery, we had a kid, we got monetary support for our other kid who’s on the spectrum to take them to therapy… We got gtube supplies, meds for infections… Anything we needed was covered. Not once did I think oh man, this is going to wreck us. Well, that’s not true, I thought that the first time I took my oldest to the doctor to get an xray because we thought they might have broken a bone, but that was just a thought and it didn’t actually cost us a penny.
Every time we went to our PCP, a specialist, or emergency, the only thing we had to pay for was parking and maybe a few bucks for pain meds. But each time we had to get pills it was less than $5 to fill the prescription. One of the kids fell and hit their head? Straight to the doctor. A cold that’s been taking too long to go away on its own? To the doctor!
Now we are back in the US, and I just paid off another medical bill because my insurance only covered a small amount of an ECG, because they wanted to check make sure my kids heart was strong enough to put her on medication, and that the meds wouldn’t kill her.
We should move to a single payer medical system.
I regularly fear for the Americans I have connected to since the days of covid stretched my group of friends more into online spaces.
One got beaten to shit by a bad boss when he tried to retrieve his tips. All at once he had injuries that kept him out of work, mental trauma and legitimate fear for his safety that meant he couldn’t return to his job but also because work and insurance are tied down there he was in an immediate precarity. He couldn’t return to work, the cops showed active disinterest in helping him press charges and his hospital bills blew through his savings… And because he had technically quit there was no EI safety net either.
I was struck so hard by the dystopian nature of it all. There is so much under the Canadian system which is just never a factor. I didn’t realize how free I actually was because I had never tied my considerations of my health to what job I chose or whether I was unemployed. I was used to my medical services bill just being this tiny expense I had set to autopay that was so small I didn’t even have to think about. They don’t even charge that any more.
All I ever had to do to get help was ask and it was freely given. I had no cause to ever question exactly how much of a blessing… How much of a privilege… that actually was.
Living in Europe, it’s easy to forget how much is covered by the national health insurance. I just had one tooth fixed, another pulled a few months ago, and getting a dental X-ray done in a few weeks. All 100% covered. My whole family got their COVID vaccines for free. My grandmother has issues with mobility, so the hospital sent a car to our house with her vaccines for free. I can just take a bike to the doctor and get a diagnosis or papers for further examination for free.
This is why I’m happy to pay taxes. I know that crooked politicians take their unfair share, but it also funds public services like healthcare.
The emotional reaction I get to these stories is hard to put into words. It’s a mix of deep sadness and incandescent rage. I just can’t imagine being in that position and not wanting to firebomb a politician’s house.
My little girl had a very high fever the other night and we were really worried about her, so we called the nurse on call hotline who advised us to wait and go to the urgent care centre in the morning unless she got suddenly worse overnight, then to head to emergency. It was all stressful enough just worrying about how sick she was. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be having to worry about paying for any of those services on top of that.
Man, I live in shit country where opposition is killed every february and ruling party of oligarchs have been destroying my country’s healthcare system for last 20 years, but I’m glad commies built it tough.
I’ve heard you even pay for ambulance.
You do. And not a small amount, like an Uber. Hundreds of dollars, regardless of how far it goes. I’m sure there are markups for care received, but I’ve not been in one to know.
Why doesn’t uber (or equivalent) do ambulances?
Liability and drivers don’t want to clean up blood to start.
For a higher fair, some may be happy to do so.
I’m pretty sure the amount you’d have to increase it to break even with the new insurance you’d need and all the cleaning would rather defeat the purpose.
That’s probably why uber ambulance doesn’t exist.
They don’t have doctors. Ambulance is not a glorified taxi.
An ambulance is a very specific type of taxi.
Yes, you need an EMT and some equipment so the cost is higher than a taxi, but not the $500+ a ride currently charged.
How about 0 charged?
At that price some (particularly old) people use ambulances as a medical taxi service.
How about a fully refunded deposit on A&E admittance?
that your country is the actual shit hole. The worst part is when people who do work, and have insurance get denied care or endebted because something is “out of range” or whatever the fuck it is you yankees call it.
I live in LATAM, and healthcare is good. I had … “worker contribution” (mutualista) tier healthcare and private medical. Mutualista worked adequately, got my needs met, but the centers were a bit spaced out, ironically due to market competition. Similar problem with the private medical insurance, but it comes with lots of fancy bells and whistles (telemedicine, medical history app, wide variety of specialists to resolve issues etc).
I pay about $100 (monthly) and it covers everything. I never have to think about going to hospital, except “Let me see if I can avoid it by doing a quick video call”
There’s also universal healthcare that covers everyone not in mutualistas or private medicine. It’s not as well regarded, but at least it’s there. If you are making tax contributions, you’re on mutualista tier healthcare anyway. I don’t think anyone hesitates to call ambulances or react properly in the case of a medical emergency.
What use is having 8 different burger chains when you get squashed by a train and you yell at people to not call an ambulance so you don’t go bankrupt?
From LATAM too and the main thing i think is: fuck. USA has always been very influential towards us. A lot of people want to imitate it because they only know it from the movies and shows or from what famous Americans share about their livestyles. And the right wings leaders over here are eager to play by their playbook. Trump got elected and now the more fringe right wing candidates are being elected here and while their eccentricities dominate the headlines the people under them work to undermine our free healthcare and public education. Some Latín Americans think it can’t happen in their country… until it happens.
Fucking Milei, most of his supporters are wielding the gadsen flag. What the hell does that flag have to do with Argentina??
We wonder if that could happen to our healthcare services and what steps we can take to prevent it.
“Voting out Tory scum” is about what I’m left with.
Our son had a pseudo-croup attack, when he was about two. We have a number here in my country that you can call and they try to figure out your next steps. Since he was so young they pretty quickly told us to call an ambulance. Two paramedics came fairly quick and ordered an emergency doctor to the scene since they wanted to give him some medication they couldn’t give him on their own.
We were a little apologetic because we weren’t sure if calling them was warranted. But they were super nice and said we shouldn’t worry, it was their job and they’d rather drive to cases like this, were things go well then the other way round.
We gave them our insurance card, they left, and everything was fine.
Never in the whole process have I thought, oh my, I hope this isn’t going to cost too much. That is an awful thought. Our medical system here is far from perfect and I fear it’s going to get worse but it gives me a piece of mind that I don’t have to worry to go broke over it.
And the way families are insured really works well. You work and all your children and your partner (if they don’t work) are insured through you. No changes in payment, no questions (apart from: are they earning any money) asked.
Canada here: Unbelievable. It’s so foreign to me to pay for medical care.
And I always post this:
Frame Canada
Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might… like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency.
Shaking my head and glad I’m not living in the US.
A country can decide how to treat people, how to shape the future. I get that nothing is perfect and everything is complicated. But I completely don’t get why the US doesn’t want to tackle some of the problems. Mainly school shootings, healthcare, social security and a democratic system by today’s standards. Maybe the latter is the answer why… And watching documentaries about the rural areas, it seems like the USA is mostly a third world country, except for in the cities.
The funny thing is that the US actually spends about twice as much on healthcare per capita as other developed countries. The reason that outcomes are so much worse there isn’t lack of money.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. Google says $13.493 per person in 2022. And in Germany it’s a bit more than $7.000…
Also things like maternal mortality are WAY worse…
I mean the USA is bigger and maybe things don’t translate exactly from a somewhat densely populated central european country to the vast emptiness of rural Wyoming. I guess an hospital is also something that is subject to economy of scale… But even most northern european countries where doctors come in with helicopters, don’t exceed the ~$7.000.
It is really off for the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita
(If that is correct, you could spend half the money on healthcare and also live 3 years longer, on average…)
Life expectancy is going down cuz suicide rates are shooting up. Like suburban boys with shopping malls, their classrooms and/or heroin/fent
Fuuuuck. Nailed it, I’m fucking kiiiiiiiiilling it today. Ziiiing!
Hmmh, but that’s only the thing on top. Contrary to other countries, life expectancy seems to be actually going down since 2014… But there is already something seriously wrong since ~1980…
Reagan, Thatcher
Yeah, it’s not a healthcare system. It’s a jobs system and wealth transfer scheme. Insurance companies have the government in their pocket and get employer money, government money, and employee money and transfer it to the already outrageously rich, and all that in between cost (salespeople, billing specialists, HR benefits specialists) is somebody’s paycheck.
That’s without consideration of actual fraud, which moves money from the government to the rich without even providing services at all, and is easier to hide in such an outrageously complicated and expensive system.
Our entire nation exists to funnel money to the rich. Whenever someone wonders, “why is x this way in the USA?” The answer is always it puts more money in a rich person’s pocket. The healthcare system is the emperor’s new clothes. Bask in it, if you can see how great it is.
The only way I’d live in the States is if I was making so much money that a 20k medical bill meant nothing to me.
Well it’s not that it means nothing to me, but my job in the US pays about $30k more than it would in Germany (I can’t speak to other countries). Lots of Germans come to the US to work in my field for that reason (well they used to before all the layoffs). Also my health insurance is free.
That said, I absolutely still want public healthcare. Not just for the people in my country who desperately need it, but for myself too. Because while my healthcare is “free”, it isn’t really; my salary could be higher otherwise. And I lose coverage if I stop working (actually not really we have programs for that, but still kind of).
$480.000 cancer treatment enters the chat.
what. Is this real?
Back in my first year of uni there, my classmate broke her femur. Got a nice 145k bill. Thank fuck she had insurance that paid most of it, because the two can negotiate any price they can come up with
You can buy a (rather small) Apartment for that over here. And still have money left for renovation.
I’m not willing to believe that the ACTUAL costs are in any reasonable correlation to the invoice.
Costs for services are basically made up. It’s incredibly complicated but I’ll give an example.
My last doctor appointment was billed at $220. I am in-network (which means my insurer has negotiated specific rates) so the insurance company says “you can only charge our insureds $105 for that service. We’ll pay $80. The patient is responsible for the rest.”
If I didn’t have insurance, I’d be on hook for the full $220. If the doctor was out-of-network, my insurance company would pay what they thought was reasonable and I’d be on the hook for the rest.
The $220 is just whatever the doctor feels like billing. It’s not based on anything other than “I feel like $220 is what my time is worth.”
Sounds fairly accurate. It’s just one privatized industry negotiating with another. Doesn’t necessarily mean that your leg is worth 145k$, however that’s how much they feel they can leech from each other. In the States, this is exactly why you ask for a full itemized bill, any time you get any work done. They will, and do abuse this system for profit
Yes. The average cost of cancer treatment is around $150,000 USD here and expensive cases can be much more.
It’s a so foreign concept for me. Needing to rationalize about going to ER. I feel sorry. People are dying and people are tricked into believing it’s the better alternative. But There is a better way, and it’s only denied because of greed.
Yeah… The Trumpers and other idiots are the ones defending this system. We’re talking about something like a third of our population, but it fluctuates.
People outside the US always overestimate these people’s opinions for some reason. I think the propaganda machine that is our media works better on foreigners than it does on US citizens. Obviously it works far better than it should on our own people, though…
The institutionalization runs deep.
The first time I moved out of the US I lived in a socialized medicine country & I just never went to the doctor. My then girlfriend casually went because she wasnt feeling well (a cold), then would go to the pharmacy for a birth control shot (no prescription needed), and finally when I had a fever and a doc came to the house at 2am (we just had to pay the taxi). I had a lengthy stay in the hospital, and a month of rehab, my employer’s nurse would stop by the house and give me an injection on his way home. And our son was born in a hospital with private rooms- all i had to pay for was my meals and overnight stay (there was a bed for me), plus the room had a mini bar…no shit.
We moved back to the US to raise the kids and then out again i to another socialized medicine country and I STILL HESITATE to go to the doctors.
Guns are a right, but you can be jailed for getting an abortion. The US is turning into a third world country.
