333

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

People have been convinced that their votes don't matter, protests don't matter, etc etc etc

"They're both the same" (in reference to parties) is the extent of most people's political sense.

It's also one of those things where there are enough safety nets and things that for most people it's never really that bad. I don't know anyone personally that's actually lost everything from medical debt. I know it's a possibility and that's scary... I even know some people that are on every aid program out there basically but those programs are paying out the thousands of dollars in monthly medical bills (i.e. in the instances I know the system actually "works" on some level albeit uncomfortably and with a lot of stress).

To put things into context for someone who doesn't live here ... car crashes, cancer, heart attacks, and other rare "inescapable" things like that are all much much more prevalent than crazy medical debt, getting shot, or going homeless.

It's not a dystopia ... most people are living at least decent lives. That's kind of the problem, it's not bad enough for an overwhelming majority of people to actually care.

That leaves some number of people who actually care for the sake of others and some number of people that care for their own sakes to deal with the problems and the propaganda that influences the (mostly) apathetic faction. The people at the bottom of the whole thing are also in the worst possible position to do anything about it because their time and credibility is ultimately judged and scarce when it comes to doing things like going out and convincing people to vote in their favor.

this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
333 points (92.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36194 readers
809 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS