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.
I can just explain the mindset, and then you can draw your conclusions: When people get sick, they evaluate whether it is bad/concerning enough as to be worth the hassle of making time to go to the doctor.
Now the situation is getting increasingly worse every year, because the public health system is underfunded, so that private alternatives look much better… So that rich people and/or private health interests, can use their wealth to “argue” (paid propaganda is cheapest) that the public heal care is not adequate, and should be further defunded… So, we’re headed in the same direction, for sure. The US just serves as the example of: take that path to its conclusion, and that’s fucked up solution you end up with.
But, people still selfishly vote for their own interests, or dumb enough to be convinced regardless. Humans sucks. Fingers crossed.