this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
201 points (95.9% liked)
Asklemmy
44128 readers
404 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Put it this way. My wife just got a something equivalent to a heart attack. Ambulance got here in 5 minutes. She spent 3 nights in the hospital, got all the tests, one of Canada's best docs in the field... it cost $135 for something to do with the ambulance.
They saved her life, she's seeing a specialist, figured out the meds and prepped if/when it happens again.
Everything was seamless. I don't know how it could have been better.
Add 3 zeroes to that amount and you've got the cost of the same ordeal in the US health "care" system
Ah yes, the "US Healthfare System"
Yeah, ambulance rides are often not free. Ditto for meds (although there's profit caps that keep those reasonable), dentists and eye doctors if you're an adult, although that's scheduled to change.
Yeah, it's weird. The gaps in our healthcare are major problems that I want to see fixed and are great uses of taxes. It's bizarre that routine eye and teeth health aren't considered health, despite how much those tie into overall health.
And the prescriptions almost feel like a loophole. You can spend a few days in the hospital undergoing an expensive surgery. Every med you get while in the hospital is free. But the moment you get out of the hospital, any ongoing meds cost money. Prescriptions are apparently a lot cheaper than the US, but they can still get hefty especially for rarer things. Plus what is affordable varies. I can easily afford the approximately $100/mo of prescriptions that I have (I actually pay either zero or $1 per prescription because my work has great insurance -- not sure why it's sometimes $1 and other times free), but for people living paycheque to paycheque, that's a lot of money and lower pay jobs often have no insurance at all (since it mostly covers dental, vision, prescriptions, and some minor others, medical insurance isn't viewed as quite so vital by many Canadians -- I think that's allowed quite a lot of companies to feel comfortable not offering anything).
One time I nicked my leg on a camping trip and opened a piddly ~2 inch cut. 911 sent out 2 paramedics on a fully crewed search and rescue night vision boat which took me to the other side of the lake where I was taken by ambulance to the hospital 1hr away. $86 dollars lol.
The thing that some Americans forget is that by saving your life, you get to live on and pay taxes for the system we all enjoy.