Asklemmy

As luck would have it, I was travelling in Las Vegas last year when I had sudden abdominal pain. Fortunately, I have travel health insurance from my work, so I went to the hospital. At that time I'd been inundated by how fucking AMAZING American healthcare is over anywhere else in the world.

I was admitted from the ER, spent a night in an overflow bed waiting for OR time, and had my operation and was discharged the following day. Just for fun, I also learned I had COVID during the intake process.

Comparing it to my experience with Canada's healthcare system, the only difference was I had to wait before being treated for a woman with a giant cart with a computer and papers and other shit to screen for my insurance to be sure I was eligible to receive care. They didn't want to treat me because my travel insurance was through another network, but they would treat me because this was deemed an emergency surgery.

Apart from that, it was essentially what I see in Canada:

• nursing staffing shortfalls
• poor communication inside the hospital (post-op team hadn't even been told I had COVID)
• "long" but acceptable wait for an emergency surgery
• standard diagnostics took a couple hours (bloodwork, CT, etc)

Some things were better:

• good parking at the hospital
• building and facilities were clean and seemed new

Some things were poorer:

• I was discharged with a prescription and told to stop at a pharmacy on the way home for painkillers. In Canada they would hand me a bag with the meds already dispensed.
• got a call from collections (in Switzerland?!) six months later asking why I hadn't paid my bill. It took far too much time to get them to understand they never gave me a bill nor access to one, and just claiming a bunch of $9999.99 expenses against my health insurance (which declined them due to lack of information) was insufficient

The whole experience left me really soured on American healthcare. It was "fine". I felt like it was free tier healthcare that nobody should be paying out of pocket for. The extra hoops and whistles SOLELY BECAUSE OF MONEY was depressing and awful.

My comparison, we just had a baby (back in Canada). I'm apparently going to have to pay a bill of a couple hundred bucks because we opted for a private room for postpartum care, but I didn't sign anything and haven't heard anything yet. I also had to pay for parking for several days, so add another maybe 50 bucks for all that. The only thing I can really complain about is how beat up the furniture in the hospital was, and how old the artwork on the wall was. Oh, and the family room that had 2 VCRs, no tapes, and a stack of DVDs (and no DVD player). Kind of petty stuff.

Tl;dr: they're the same in my eyes, except one cost $70,000 for 18 hours and the other cost me $500 for 3 days.