I was reading Michael Caine autobiography, “The elephant to Hollywood”. At a certain point he’s in living in LA, and his wife becomes suddenly ill. She had a burst appendix, one of these “you have surgery on a couple hours or you die” situations. The thing is once they get to the hospital and she’s properly diagnosed, Caine is asked $5000 beforehand for her operation, and he’s literally told; “No money, no operation”. Eventually he realizes that he belongs to the actors Gild, so the operation is covered, and everything was alright. But I wondered, does (did) the US health system really work like this? Will a perfectly curable person be left to die just because a forward payment can’t be done? For context, this happened in LA probably in the 60s or 70s.
Not these days. These days hospitals are legally required to save your life if they are able. However, that won’t stop them from sticking you with crippling debt afterwards. Which, has lead to people taking their own lives.
A lot of people don’t bother to pay the debt and just let it go to collections. That means the people with insurance end up paying for it anyway.
You know what it’s called in more civilized places when you can walk into an emergency room and get the help you need and someone else subsidizes that because you can’t afford it? Socialized medicine.
But in the US, we insert a middle man to make it more expensive —so we can tell ourselves it’s not.
That is technically true but the reality is not as simple. Hospitals can determine something is not immediately life threatening. Or they might treat an immediate threat and discharge leading to death soon after… Things are still very bad here and it’s very scary.
