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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2782 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 12, 2023

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.

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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.

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.

I run a cancer forum on reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/coloncancer In the 6+ years moderating the community, I have encountered exactly zero Americans being bankrupted or made destitute due to medical debt, or being denied treatments or long delays owing to unaffordability. Everyone gets good, timely, high-quality treatments regardless of socioeconomic status, including costly surgeries and the latest chemo even if there is low likelihood of the procedures working. High medical bills are either negotiated lower, covered by various insurance programs (like Medicaid), covered by charity care, etc. Medical debt can be easily discharged, unlike other types of debt.

Fascinating!

One thought: is the group of people that doesn't have insurance and therefore doesn't get annual physicals and therefore doesn't have their colon cancer detected before it's way too late (a) a real cohort and (b) very well represented here? That would be a case of people having worsened outcomes because of poor access to care, no?

From what I have read, Canadians who have above average risk factors, such as family history, seem to have the hardest time getting timely colonoscopies, which would detect the cancer sooner.

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