"Am I a bad person?" Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to.
www.vox.com
The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.

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.

  • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
    3·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure they laugh at us, then feel a bit of pity, because most of us aren’t terrible people, but most of us can’t afford good healthcare because we vote for corrupt politicians in 2-party system of basically the same options, except one loves Russia and uses abortions to seduce the religious

    • steb
      6·
      10 months ago

      Nobody with a little bit of compassion laughs at stories like this. People read this with a bit of incredulity and a lot of compassion. We might make fun of Americans at times, but there’s no humour here.

      • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
        1·
        10 months ago

        I’d argue most people on earth don’t have much compassion outside of their own circle.

        • steb
          1·
          10 months ago

          I sincerely hope and believe you’re wrong. Sure, there grades, but I don’t think there absence of compassion outside our circles.

            • steb
              1·
              10 months ago

              I don’t need either. We have a working health care system. My comment was about people having compassion outside their “circle”.

                • steb
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  I don’t know who “we” are in your context, but strongly suspect my “we” is not the same.