Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 106
- 4
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.
EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger
I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.
My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.
I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"
To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.
In my experience most of the American expats who talk about how great the healthcare system is in other countries are almost always young people who don't have to deal with catastrophic problems or manage long-term conditions, and if they did wouldn't have had a comparable experience back in the US. I remember one former coworker who was living in France brag about how he went to the doctor for some minor ailment and was only charged ten dollars and got a prescription that only cost a few bucks. Well, that's pretty much how it works in the US if you have any kind of insurance at all that isn't an absolute bottom-feeder. I had cellulitis about a decade ago and that's pretty much how it was at urgent care, they gave me a bunch of prescriptions that were so inexpensive the OTC probiotic the doctor recommended was more expensive than all of them combined. For more serious ailments the usual story is that you go in and don't pay anything up front and then in a few months the insurance company sends you a bill that's more than you think you should pay based on your understanding of the policy but not enough that it causes any financial hardship or is worth complaining about. So like a few hundred dollars.
When it comes to medical bankruptcies, I practiced bankruptcy law for a while and they aren't what you think they are. While you occasionally see someone who was uninsured and now owes a hospital $60 grand or something, that's pretty rare. What's more common is that a relatively low-income person has insurance but an injury or illness keeps them out of work for an extended period and they're forced to borrow to pay for expenses. These people aren't likely to have short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability from Social Security doesn't kick in until after they've been out of work for a year (though they get paid from the date they stopped work), and takes a while to process. By the time they get their disability payments or are back to work they're so far in a hole that bankruptcy is the best option. They usually have a lot of unpaid medical bills that are included in the bankruptcy, but that's not the driving force.
Good points, you try to bring these up anywhere else like reddit or hacker news and get downvoted to oblivion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link