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.
Honestly? The real feeling I get from this is being scared for the future. I do know that there are powerful forces seeing a business opportunity in that status quo that can be exported. And you can see the impetus towards eroding the safety nets here following marching orders from the far right, anarchocapitalist mothership all throughout the world. In some of the countries I’ve lived in there is already a push towards this model, just moderated by the existence of some sort of universal health care. Sure, even the bare minimum of public service care takes a TON of the edge off. Those ER bills are what some of my friends in those places paid for, say, having major surgery or good care while having a baby… but it’s a slippery slope.