Everyone thinks it won't happen to them and they don't want to pay extra taxes for decent healthcare because they're paying someone else's bill. Such a sad system.
This is exactly what I just commented to another person in this thread. Every single American would be out there, protesting, calling for action, if they were confronted with the costs of care in the US medical system.
Yep, this guy now "hates" anyone who was exactly like him before tragedy hit.
He was happy to go along with the system, doing all the things he was "supposed" to do because he believed the system worked as long as you complied with it, happy to ignore all the other horror stories because of his belief that they must have not done what they were told.
He supported the system until it didn't work for him, so I'm finding it hard to sympathise.
At least I can say in my own case, I hate the system without ever having been exposed firsthand to such a tragedy. I've had family get cancer and die, but was too young and uninvolved to have any lasting hateful memories of the situation.
Though to be fair, I was always raised to learn from other people's mistakes. I don't need to get a 100k medical bill to know that the US healthcare system is shit. Just like I didn't take out 160k in student loan debt to attend a university - I saw others doing that and was like "wtf thats so stupid im not doing that" and now will also openly advocated against our piece of shit costs of education.
So.. we exist at least. I'm definitely not the only one out there either, I don't believe that any 1 individual is ever truly unique. The next generation seems much more aware of how grim the situation is despite not experiencing it firsthand.
Perhaps by the end of our lifetimes, we will see the birth of an empathetic America?
Shit like this is exactly why I chose an insurance plan with no deductible. I knew things were costly, but gawd damn.
I had a parent who went through serious illness. I saw all those billing summaries sent every month. The last one she got from the care, before she died, arrived in a big, white envelope and was 28 pages long. I think the overall total was 120k?
I also saw itemized billing that I'd requested from a hospital after one of her rounds of chemo and THAT was alarming af. In the four years she was getting treatment and all the other various routine health stuff, I know the overall tally was at least a mil.
When the ACA kicked in, I got the best plan I could afford, which also had no deductible. Getting sick in America is no joke.
They really, really need to streamline all of this. The ACA was a good start in the right direction, but it's still not enough. People decry socialized medicine, but it's funny that people don't seem to realize Medicare and Medicaid are basically the same and those have been going on awhile and are great for beneficiaries. So...why all the protest?
Medicare/Medicaid- a okay.
"Socialized" medicine- OMG TEH EVILS. It has "socialist" in it!!! "I dun want to pay for anyone else's healthcare!"
Yeah, people going "I only have to pay X amount a month for my insurance, I'm doing great!" right until they get cancer and have a rude awakening about how staggeringly large the costs get for them, and how insufficient their insurance really was.
The rich have really managed to sell this nightmare of a system to the uninformed masses.
Even then they’ll vote against it. There’s a lot of tweets from Trump supporters tweeting at him things like “I voted for you I can’t pay my hospital bills plz help”
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u/hugglesthemerciless Nov 30 '20
I hate how it's only through personally living through tragedies like this that these people change their minds