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.
Yeah, I do want to say that nothing is as bad as our bad news highlights. Even all the crazy”Florida Man” stuff, at least some of that is from laws favoring transparency in the legal system over other places favoring privacy of the accused. A lot of the political craziness is just posturing for points. Gun violence may be twice that of other developed countries but it’s still pretty low and most people do not live in fear. Etc etc.
I’d even claim some of what you hear is good, in that it’s a good value to criticize your own society. That’s how we get better.
Then again, most of it is probably outrage headlines and clickbait.