People just love to talk about how horrible the US healthcare system is but my disabled daughter has never paid a dime for care in her life (in Kansas, of all places!) via Medicaid. Even her birth was free due to retroactive Medicaid. Her 9 months in the NICU was billed at over $2 million. Thanks taxpayers.
I was having chest pains last week and got triaged within minutes at the ER. I’m pretty sure I “owe” them $500 for a previous ER visit which nobody mentioned during my stay.
My 65 year old uncle hasn’t had insurance in 20 years but when he got cancer three ago the social worker helped him sign up for disability and they got him on Medicare so fast your head would spin. He started chemo basically immediately and while his cancer is terminal the treatment has kept him alive for a long time, even longer than the doctors predicted.
My wife got billed $200,000+ for a visit in the hospital when she had a critical illness and almost died. She ended up paying $2000. This was more than ten years ago and it didn’t ruin her credit and nobody ever came after her for it.
And One more. The hospital messed up the billing for our first daughter’s birth and called us two years later saying we didn’t have insurance (we did). My wife said that was their problem. We never heard from them again or got a bill. I guess they just ate the cost? No idea. But it was over seven years ago and there were zero consequences and we never paid a dime.
We did, through our taxes and insurance premiums and opportunity costs. We paid for average care plus the greatest medical rentier system in the galaxy.
If by "socialized medicine" you mean public option health insurance, then yes it does work. I'm willing to bet, though, that the poster you're replying to only received care from privately run hospitals/clinics, so calling it socialized medicine seems misleading.
> calling it socialized medicine seems misleading.
Outside of the UK, that is how health care in developed countries is organized. It's either that or some version of Obamacare (regulated, private, with price caps and subsidies) or a combination.
American conservatives call them all, without exception, "socialized medicine".
US health is socialized in that the public will pay for it if you're willing to game the system like the uncle in this story, plus spin the wheel of chance to see how much you'll how privately anyway. I don't think the uncle here acted maliciously or TRIED to game the system, but that is what happened and that is what will continue to happen with this shitty half implemented system.
Hah, the world is complicated. I feel like me and my family are the worst case scenario in the health care system and it worked… pretty well aside from them wanting to give my daughter too much care she didn’t need.
The US basically has socialized medicine that scares naive/“honest”/conscientious middle class people into paying up to subsidize it. I suspect if we passed legislation tomorrow to make the US a single payer system it’d all fall apart. But I suppose we’ve managed to trick the US taxpayers into socializing medicine while letting them pretend we haven’t.
Man it just seems insane to me that you are acting like being billed $2 million, $200,000, and having unknown other bills, is somehow a good system.
Let's be honest, overbilling and non-accountability is a huge disaster here. While people like you slip through the cracks in terms of not needing to pay, others slip through the cracks in terms of not getting care at all.
I was having chest pains last week and got triaged within minutes at the ER. I’m pretty sure I “owe” them $500 for a previous ER visit which nobody mentioned during my stay.
My 65 year old uncle hasn’t had insurance in 20 years but when he got cancer three ago the social worker helped him sign up for disability and they got him on Medicare so fast your head would spin. He started chemo basically immediately and while his cancer is terminal the treatment has kept him alive for a long time, even longer than the doctors predicted.
My wife got billed $200,000+ for a visit in the hospital when she had a critical illness and almost died. She ended up paying $2000. This was more than ten years ago and it didn’t ruin her credit and nobody ever came after her for it.
And One more. The hospital messed up the billing for our first daughter’s birth and called us two years later saying we didn’t have insurance (we did). My wife said that was their problem. We never heard from them again or got a bill. I guess they just ate the cost? No idea. But it was over seven years ago and there were zero consequences and we never paid a dime.