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.
First thought is that you need to do that research aa soon as you move to the new house, change your insurance or job.
Second is obvious, strange county you have over there. But I guess most of the people are satisfied with that, as with paying for school.
i don’t think it’s reasonable to say “most of the people are happy with that”. Most people in the US are definitely NOT happy with how the medical industry or insurance works. But i do think it’s fair to say that most people don’t understand that voting for the guy that says they will prevent higher taxes is also working to keep the insurance system in place OR they would rather have lower taxes than better insurance (and are too dumb to realize that would be a net gain) OR they don’t vote at all.
When you don’t have viable choices, that is most certainly NOT ‘being satisfied with that’.
The problem here is that hospitals do not remain under the same management consistently. Apparently I am responsible for knowing when each of the local hospitals changes administrations (because capitalism and they get bought out) and stops or begins accepting my insurance. When I first moved into my house the closest hospital did NOT accept my insurance, last I checked they do, but that was a few years ago, so who knows now. The hospital closest to me has changed names 3 times in the last 15 years.
It’s ridiculous that in an emergency that “when was the last time we checked to make sure that hospital takes our insurance” is even a question.