I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system?
I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system?
The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.
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.
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I remember an other US post of a guy who had done everything he was supposed to. Had insurance, had savings, had a well paid job.
Nonetheless, his whole family was in financial ruins when his wife got cancer. They had to move from the house and everything!
The fact that you don't think a $2-5k bil is a lot, just proves that this system does not work, especially because some people would not even be able to pay that back for years!
To me, this is hopeless. I'd much rather pay half of my salary in taxes and be sure that if something happens, it will be the only thing that happens and that I'll be taken good care of (and even my family will be offered help to cope). And in topnof that I get free education, 5 weeks free with pay, over 20 weeks paid maternity leave and pension. To me that sounds like a much better deal. The fact that others get the same by paying less does IMO not make it a worse deal.
The fact that you feel like the
You have people here in the U.S. who resent paying for health insurance "because I'm healthy." As if viruses care. Or car crashes. Or cancer.
And you tell them that and they just wave you away as if they're totally immune from those sort of things.
Edit: Sorry, I realize I wasn't clear here. I want universal healthcare. I'm talking about financially stable people in the U.S. that can afford health insurance but instead just go to the ER, driving up wait times and costs at the expense of poor people.
Well, if insurance isn't going to help anyway, as in the example above, I understand why they don't. If you get financially ruined by getting sick, it doesn't really matter how ruined you get. At some point you'd give up and accept that there is no way out of that pit. That said, even breaking a leg would ruin you, if you don't have insurance, whereas the example above was substantially more serious.
Personally, I have smashed my thumb once, when I was younger, and recently my knee. Both times needed surgery, and were pretty complicated, but I had no stress about expenses or even concerns about consequenses at work. Everything was free, and I got paid my regular sallary while I was recovering. This is without insurance, in a country with free healthcare!
You don't get financially ruined by any sort of sickness. Long-term illnesses can ruin you financially even if you have good insurance, but basic medicine and, especially, preventative medicine to stop long-term illness is not expensive with insurance and pretty important to be able to afford.
Would I like it to be universal healthcare? Absolutely. But their "because I'm healthy" excuse is bullshit and puts a strain on an ER system that is already being strained by people who can't afford insurance rather than don't want to pay it.
Just because you don't get financially ruined by getting I'll, , does not mean that others won't.
62% of all adults in the US, live paycheck to paycheck. If they break a leg, it's not safe to assume that they'd recover financially
My point is, that if you can't pay back $35k for a complicated fraction, you won't care if you can't pay $200k for cancer treatment. It's the same
They live paycheck-to-paycheck in part because they have to pay for health insurance, which is why a compound fracture wouldn't cost them $35,000.