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.
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.