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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2783 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.

In practice, I think that the way that the NHS squeezes doctors and nurses is a false economy. The result is staff shortages, the importation of less competent doctors and nurses from the third world, and the flight of talented trained medical staff for sunnier climes with better pay. It's of course, entirely typical of our politics - see immigration, housing, infrastructure. Saving pennies today to end up poorer than Poland by the end of the decade. The UK was once, I remind people, on track to be richer per capita than the United States.

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