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.
In our defense, the Republican “half” of the country aren’t actually half the country. They’re the smallest of the 3 major political affiliations among votin-age Americans: “None”, “Democrat”, and then “Republican”. In that order.
“None” is the largest single political affiliation in America, and that has been a kind of negative feedback loop in our politics. People are disenfranchised and feel disconnected from the governance of our country, so they don’t (or can’t) vote, and because they don’t vote, they’re not represented in government and are easier to disenfranchise. This, and rampent legalized bribery, have created a great deal of our problems.
Not to say voters are the source of the feedback loop, it’s being actively driven by autocratic politicians and moneyed interest.