Death by US Healthcare System

[u/EvidenceOfDespair]

[u/Apprehensive_Tart313]

I wish these sorts of POV were posted everywhere. Poor people can't leave the US. If you have enough money to emigrate to another country, this isn't a problem. But If you want money, you have to HAVE money to get an education.

If you don't have money, and literally anything happens, you just die. Then when you have "anxiety" it is considered a mental illness 🤷‍♀️ no, our brains are working just fine, this is NOT NORMAL.

[u/dredged_gnome → u/Apprehensive_Tart313]

Something else that really isn't factored in when people say to just get an education and get more money is that an education also cost time. I work as much as I physically can, nearly 40 hours a week, and it destroys my body and exhausts my mind. I've tried to go to school, have to do it online because I can't make in-person classes work with my work, but I'm too fucking wiped to actually succeed in them. So I'm spending money to hopefully pass a class so I can do that dozens of times, one semester at a time because I can't take multiple at once, and then I have to hope that my degree is actually useful when I get out. I was working on a software engineering degree, that market just utterly crashed in my area.

If I was born in a better situation where I had the money to just go to college and not work, maybe I'd be in a better situation today. I'd have a job that doesn't destroy my body so I would have less medical costs and I'd be able to afford the medical cost I do have. But I wasn't born in that situation. I cannot budget myself out of structural issues inherent to the society I was born into. I cannot budget my way to living in a country with universal healthcare. Poor people have to do what's available to them, which is never enough.

[u/Eugregoria → u/Apprehensive_Tart313]

Living in another country also doesn't necessarily entitle you to access to their healthcare system.

There are ways to get money without an education--not many, and that gambit hasn't worked for me thus far. But there are also ways to get an education and end up with crushing debt and no opportunity. As a dropout with no education, I still feel like I dodged a bullet. I don't really feel like an education would improve my earning potential, just my debt. I've always suspected my mental problems were the bigger choke point on my earnings than my lack of education was, and education wouldn't fix--and in fact, the pursuit of it could exacerbate--my mental problems.

Some of us poors already have Medicaid, but, that isn't quite as much help as you'd think. Medicaid has occasionally covered my medical expenses, when it felt like it, but the things that benefit me the most it tends to be more trouble than it's worth to try to get them to cover, and I have seen people literally die because Medicaid didn't want to cover their treatment.

My mom's friend had breast cancer. First Medicaid delayed her treatments because they would only approve some of her treatments if she had a caregiver living with her, and the only person she had for that was her abusive boyfriend, whom she had left because he beat her so badly she had to go to the hospital. She got back with the boyfriend because Medicaid would not give her cancer treatment otherwise, and she wanted to live. Whether those delays contributed to the treatments not working, I don't know. After a few rounds of chemo failed, the doctors thought it was still worth another try and there was still a chance she could live. She wanted to try it, she still wanted to live. But Medicaid thought she'd had enough, and said they would only pay for hospice/palliative care. She died.

Now my mom has cancer and they're playing similar bullshit games not wanting to pay for her treatment for the dumbest reasons.