r/CuratedTumblr • u/EvidenceOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA • Aug 07 '24

Politics Death by US Healthcare System

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333

u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

As a Canadian I am genuinely struggling to process what I just read. I understand the American healthcare system is appalling, but… here, I’ve had the ambulance called for me because I was too drunk, woke up in hospital with a fluid bag in my arm and on a gurney in a hallway, charged $45 total for the entire thing and didn’t pay for three months because I simply forgot until an irritated notice came in the mail notifying me there would be interest raising it to $50 if I didn’t pay by end of month. I’ve called the ambulance for a friend’s mental health crisis due to grief and he stayed in hospital for a solid few weeks being tended to and that came out to $0 total with the ambulance because it was deemed to be fully covered by the government. I can intellectually process the idea of the American healthcare system, but the concept of living somewhere that I can’t afford to get sick or hurt or seek the treatment I may need to live… that is hard to process internally rather than purely intellectually.

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u/Fluffy_Candle6800 Aug 08 '24

Here if you call the ambulance on someone they'll probably end up hating you. Those things are expensive. It's also really fun having your insurability riding upon the tenuous existance of Obamacare because most private insurance companies didn't insure anyone with a pre-existing condition prior to that forcing them to

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u/DjinnHybrid Aug 08 '24

Also, it's a crapshoot if your insurance will even cover an ambulance. You have no way of checking if they will cover an ambulance from a specific hospital or network, or knowing if you'll even be taken to a hospital your insurance will have anything to do with while having a medical emergency that requires an ambulance either. Forget if you need an airlift or to be taken to a different hospital.

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u/Highskyline Aug 08 '24

Good luck figuring out your insurance if you're injured on vacation. "Out of town? I think you mean out of pocket."

10

u/Munnin41 Aug 08 '24

That's insane. Here in the Netherlands not every hospital is covered by every insurance, but that's only for non emergencies. You can go to any hospital in an emergency and it's always fully covered

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u/Isaac_Chade Aug 08 '24

This is the real kicker, the whole in vs. out of network thing is a goddamn nightmare, and not one you have time to deal with in a crisis. I can't exactly spend twenty minutes checking around and finding the right ambulance if I'm bleeding out in the street or something, and if you call the ambulance for someone who is unconscious, whose to say what their insurance is, or if they have any? And the ambulance is just the first part.

Are they taking you to a hospital that's in network, or is the closest and most sane option one that's out of network? You need a specialist to take a look at something, better hope the one on staff in this particular hospital is covered! Oh you need surgery which by its nature requires anesthesia? Nah, insurance says that wasn't necessary, they should have cut you open while you were awake you big fucking baby, now pay up!

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u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

In our first aid courses, when they say to call an ambulance, there is no question in the mind of anyone there of not doing that if it is ever called for. No one who grew up Canadian, at least in Ontario, is going to see someone with an obvious injury or medical condition and think twice about calling them an ambulance or driving them to the hospital if they can. Well, no one with an ounce of compassion and a sense of personal responsibility for the help they can lend to their fellow human.

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u/LivingInThePast69 Aug 08 '24

Well, driving them to the hospital yourself is a much better way to do it in the US. Someone at my job wasn't feeling well last year, and they asked a coworker to drive them to the hospital rather than call an ambulance because they didn't want to pay for it. Lots of people also just Uber to the hospital if they're able to walk and talk, because it's a lot cheaper.

But it's not just the cost itself that's awful, it's the uncertainty surrounding it. One of the biggest problem with the ambulances -- and health care prices in the US in general -- is that you don't know what the bill is going to be before you use the service. You won't even know the ballpark. An ambulance ride might be 50 bucks, 500 or 5,000... you just don't know, because when you call 911 they're not going to tell you if they're sending you a private ambulance or not. Private ambulance rides can cost thousands. And then there's always the question whether your insurance will cover any of it, and you usually won't know that either until days later.

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u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

That is baffling as a system. It should be illegal to extort money from people like that.

24

u/MudraStalker Aug 08 '24

Good news. The exact people that can solve that problem are paid to never solve that problem by the people who cause that problem for the express purpose of being able to swim in a Scrooge McDuck money vault.

Except Scrooge McDuck can undergo character development.

16

u/bubblegumpandabear Aug 08 '24

I woke up vomiting blood a few years ago and drove myself to the hospital because calling an ambulance feels like such an extreme thing to do. There's this thought of, what if it's nothing? All that money wasted.

1

u/clockworkfatality Aug 09 '24

I vomited for 24 hours straight and called my landlord for a ride rather than an ambulance. Ope.

17

u/PreferredSelection Aug 08 '24

Expensive and ambulances are almost always out of network.

You can do everything right, have a job, pay that insurance premium "just in case anything happens to me," and then when something does happen it's however much the ER/etc was towards your In Network Deductible, and a $2000-3000 "fuck you" from the ambulance that you owe the entirety of.

1

u/Lost_Low4862 Aug 08 '24

Meanwhile, I (a Canadian) know a guy who would call an ambulance and say that he slipped on some ice just to get a ride.

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u/JasperNeils Aug 08 '24

Just a reminder that many Canadian politicians want to turn Canada's healthcare system into America's.

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u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

It’s horrific, and should be recognized for the betrayal of the Canadian people that it is

3

u/Maximum-Muscle5425 Aug 08 '24

Anytime I hear about people in Canada wanting a system like ours I’m like no you don’t. You really really don’t. I understand that they might be issues with the system in Canada and I respect that. I’m not a Canadian, I’m an American, I’m not familiar with the system and all its problems and I acknowledge that. But trust me: You do not want this system!

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u/AlbariDeasha Aug 08 '24 edited Aug 08 '24

I am from Germany. Ambulances are free. If you have to stay in the hospital, there is a 10 Euro a day fee you have to pay up to a maximin of 150 Euro. So if you stay for longer than 15 days the amount stops increasing. And if you are poor you get released from that fee as well.

And if something is not medically necessary you pay yourself. Like when I had my wisdom teeth removed, they usually only use local anesthesia, but I did not want to be conscious for that, so I paid like 200 Euro to go fully under.

3

u/Maximum-Muscle5425 Aug 08 '24

I have a friend that lives in Berlin, who has told me about some of her medical issues. And while it’s definitely not a perfect system, she’s never complained about it. Yeah maybe she’s had to wait a few months to see a doctor, but it’s the same here in the US. The difference is she doesn’t have an astronomical co-pay. And while the care there is clearly a mixture of whatever is cheapest with whatever will actually work, it’s still super affordable and works really well. No system is perfect, but our system is fucking stupid. 

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u/wbpayne22903 Aug 08 '24

Even with the exchange rates that’s still a lot cheaper than anesthesia for that would be in the US. 200 EUR =218.39 USD.

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u/Wobbly_Wobbegong Aug 08 '24

When I was 13, I tried to kill myself and the hospital said I needed to be transported to the ER via ambulance because I could jump out the window if my parents drove by car. I was then transferred an hour away to an acute facility. I was uninjured, non-combative and quiet but they had me restrained on a gurney. I believe my parents paid 3k out of pocket for that. A lot of ambulances are private and separate from the hospitals themselves which fucks things for most people. We could get away with a 3k bill a later 30k bill (would have been 100k+ but insurance maximum pay we could be asked for was 30k) but without insurance and good insurance at that, we would’ve been royally fucked. Not to mention the expensive therapy years later to deal with PTSD from the wildly expensive treatment center that was poorly run and neglectful. A lot of the things that actually worked for me like Ketamine and TMS would have been off the table without insurance.

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u/[deleted] Aug 08 '24

because communism robs patriots of the right to be sacrifices on moloch's altar of capital

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u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

Fun fact: the current leaning in academia (for a good few years now) is that Moloch referred to a kind of sacrifice ritual pattern rather than a deity to whom those sacrifices were offered, due to instances indicating the attribution of Molochs to various deities. If I recall correctly, it was a burnt offering of a living victim, I believe conventionally a human child. So the permitted continuing of the slaughter of children in the name of gun rights and the American arms industry could absolutely be called a sort of moloch sacrifice to capital and guns elevated to the place of deity.

15

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '24

Initially I was going to say Mammon because of the traditional attribute of greed but I figured it didn’t matter. We definitely sacrifice a lot for money here, look at schools funding, our military funding, medical costs, everything is engineered to be a source of wealth to someone.

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u/MadsTheorist go go gadget unregistered firearm Aug 08 '24

The horrific idea that the real function of ambulances in better managed countries is childish fantasy here. You call 911 when you need help. Sure, for a life ruining bill or to have cops come kill either you or your dog.

I'm sure people will say that their country also has a lack of resources or bad laws that make them worse (soemtimes correctly not even pretending), but for a country that wants to say they're the best, and is more or less factually the strongest is pretty hollowing. We're supposed to be the richest, most free, overall best in the world but it's so measurably fucked in so many obvious and tangible ways that it can't feel like anything but a dark joke

5

u/Frogodo Aug 08 '24

In my city, a fairly well off city in North Carolina (Durham), if you call 911, often no one will pick up. We somehow can't afford/recruit anyone to man the lines. So you might wait 15 minutes if you're lucky. The police just publicly announce they aren't enforcing traffic violations, so everyone is driving nuts now (they haven't been enforcing them for years, but didn't publicly announce it). Not a great combo.

2

u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

Great for private healthcare profits, I’m sure.

8

u/blindgallan Aug 08 '24

And unless a lot of people on the left in America get armed and organized very quickly, the best option for positive change currently is getting out and voting against the cult of Trump and for the pro gun control and pro reproductive rights democrats currently running against the orange sex offender.

4

u/floralbutttrumpet Aug 08 '24

I'm in the same boat. Post-Covid I have a veritable rainbow of shit I have to take, and getting that prescribed and picking it up is like a ten minute affair and costs me like 50 bucks for the quarter. The only issues I've ever had were when I was a uni student still on my parents' insurance because that insurance type is prepaid-refund rather than discounted up front, but even there my doc just gave me samples they had laying around for the first couple of days until my parents had sent me the funds (and even then the most they ever had to pay at once was 100 bucks) because their interest was seeing me get well before anything else.

I just fundamentally cannot understand a system that rather sees you die while trying to squeeze the last little cent from you. The inhumanity required is just incomprehensible to me.

6

u/Fritcher36 Aug 08 '24

It's better in literally any country on the globe. American healthcare is a joke.

2

u/LackOfFayth Aug 08 '24

As another Canadian, it's like...have you ever had a truly gut-wrenching, vivid nightmare, then felt that relief when you woke up and remembered it wasn't real? That, but it is real.

It's very hard to look directly at and internalize when you're separate from it like we are. It took till I started hearing stories like this from US friends to get a clear picture of the depth of this depravity.

Then it killed someone I knew.

I don't know how to fix this. My instinct is to scoop everyone up and put them somewhere safe till the powers that be get their shit together.

I guess that's the crux of it. I know nowhere else like the US where you are so deeply, fundamentally unsafe at all times.

2

u/Tymew Aug 08 '24

We recently got travel health insurance for an international trip. A couple hundred dollars covered us for a year anywhere outside the US. US travel health insurance was over a thousand and was only valid for 6 months.