"Am I a bad person?" Why one mom didn’t take her kid to the ER — even after poison control said to.
www.vox.com
The emergency room bill I can’t stop thinking about.

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.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
    5·
    4 months ago

    Thanks for the suggestion. Of course Netflix doesn’t have this 1988 movie… Let me see if I can pirate it… And thanks for teaching me the term “Pax Americana”.

    The USA is somewhat far away from the wars it is or has been engaged with. I think the situation is a bit different than for other countries. That is also a thing I don’t quite get about the USA. Back in the cold war enormous sums of money were invested to fight the USSR. And nowadays Putin wants to revive that and the USA really struggles to represent their interests. I mean the USA isn’t tied as closely to eastern europe as for example a central european country where I live is. But there are some economic interests at play and the USA also benefits from a stable eastern europe and Russia/China not wreaking havoc in the world. This time it’s not even American soldiers who have to die in that battle. And the USA could advertise for their arms industry and make some profit, too. But all of that is overshadowed by national politics and it seems to cripple politics and working towards mid-term and long-term interests.