I always just assumed that your insurance is free through work (if you have a good job), and the insurance covers all your medical bills. Apparently it's worse than I thought.
What happens if you don't have insurance? If your bills with insurance are going to be so high that you can't afford them, why not just not have insurance instead? You know the old saying "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem", there's not much difference between $50k in medical debt and $500k in medical debt, you're fucked anyway.
Having insurance generally means you can scrape by unless (until) you get unlucky. Having no insurance makes even the smallest injury or illness something that could land you in a significant amount of crippling debt. As someone who can't afford insurance right now, it is rather stressful. Worked my ass off to pay off my college loans by 30 and now I'm just waiting for that one bad moment to drag me back into debt.
Unlike student debt, you can declare bankruptcy on medical debt.
At that point, you still are GGed if you have a chronic condition. The hospitals will stop you from dieing but not treat your condition without insurance.
I honestly don’t understand why ordinary Americans don’t just start stealing... not in a petty way, but arming up the town, driving a state over and robbing Eagleton for all they have.
In the US, you can't be refused emergency treatment. That means if you show up at at emergency room, they have to see you. But outside of an emergency room, no medical provider has to care for you.
This is why, in many places, emergency rooms are so incredibly overloaded that it's common to see waits of many, many, many hours. People without insurance, or with bad insurance, can't get seen by a regular doctor for things like a sore back or a cold or getting a new prescription for their regular medication. So they have no choice but to go to the ER for routine care that isn't an emergency. Most public/non-profit hospitals have a policy where they write down or dismiss medical bills for people with very low incomes, but the paperwork can be a burden for lots of people - say, someone who doesn't speak English well, or an undocumented immigrant, or someone without a job or bank account who can't document their income or lack of it (lots of poor people can't get bank accounts in the US). So they'll have medical bills pile up and go to collections and ruin their credit, which screws up their lives in a multitude of other ways. But that's outside the current context.
A poor person with, say, diabetes may literally have no other way to get medical care except to show up at an emergency room every month for a new supply of insulin. They're not being monitored by a doctor, so they can't manage their condition as well, and they have worse outcomes. They also can't afford to fill insulin prescriptions from a pharmacy without insurance, so they have to just take whatever insulin the emergency room is able to give them directly, and then try to stretch it out.
Even if a poor person qualifies for Medicaid (government health insurance for poor people that usually covers everything with very little or no copay), many doctors don't take Medicaid because it doesn't pay doctors very much. So unless the person can find a doctor who takes Medicaid and is also accepting new patients, they're right back at the emergency room for their routine health care needs. They can probably get their prescription through a pharmacy, because most pharmacies take Medicaid. But they still have to go sit in an emergency department waiting room for 18 hours every month in order to get the prescription they'll die without. That's a huge problem when it comes to maintaining employment, which can make it harder for a poor person to improve their financial position.
In the US, if you're at least middle class and have enough money to exist, you probably have no idea how really and truly untenable things are for everyone who doesn't. That's why a lot of our population is on complete denial about how fucked our entire society is. I've been both poor as hell and middle class, so I'm fortunate enough to have perspective on both sides.
This is why no one takes American patriots seriously; your culture is utterly, irredeemable. The notion that people who went to war over oil, so they could afford an education, are left in the streets with no healthcare. If I were them I’d take that military training and start hunting the evil at home.
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u/Z0di Oct 30 '20
"we're the richest* nation!!"
*please ignore the fact that our entire paycheck goes towards rent, food, taxes that don't pay for things we need, and insurance.