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 used to be horrified and outraged. Now I just think it’s hilarious. No problem, cause you got the 2nd amendment, right? You can get all the health care you need by just holding up a hospital. Haha.
I have learned that whenever something doesn’t make sense about the US, it is racism. When segregation was declared unconstitutional, the southern states vowed “massive resistance”. The baddies can also riot and mobilize civil society. They privatized what they could to thwart the overreach of the tyrannical government. People are naturally selfless, in that they are willing to suffer to hurt the right people. I fear this insanity is also spreading in Europe, as people are becoming aware of immigration. People do not vote in their own interest if it might benefit “the other”, but they do vote against it if it might hurt “the other”.
Of course, rational self-interest is also a factor. The US spends ~17% of its GDP on health care, compared to ~13% in Germany on second place. This is despite the fact that it has a younger population and does not cover everyone. So, yeah, those evil corporations again. But, maybe not just “them”. That’s also a lot of white collar jobs and you can see in AI threads how people feel when those are threatened.