this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Asklemmy
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The intense income disparity.
Healthcare bills.
I suppose these are cliche topics but as a non-american non-tourist the first thing that has stood out to me is that the highs are so incredibly high, and the lows are so incredibly low. Being a Canadian, it's not like we don't also have income disparity...but the gap is not as insane. The rich in the US have yachts that are 100's of millions of dollars, and the poor literally carry their kids on their backs while selling fruit on the side of the highway. You can see both in the same day.
Also I don't think Americans truly understand that you can get weeks of hospital care in Canada and not even receive a bill. Like a month in a private hospital room and i paid for a phone bill, a wifi bill, and some parking fees. In the US if you even so much as flash your eyelashes at a doctor you get a bill for hundreds of dollars.
While I agree with the essence of what you are saying. I want to say, if you have insurance the "bill" might be hundreds, but my share might only be 20 usd, if anything at all. If my "bill" was thousands, I might see my share be a couple hundred usd at most. It is possible for it to be far less then a couple hundred.
The other thing people don't mention is, if I honestly can't pay my share. I can walk into the billing office at the clinic /hospital and explain I honestly can't afford my share. The hospital will bill the insurance what they can, then look for extra funding. Most hospitals have a charity fund. It is based on my income. If I am broke and make crap wages, my share might be reduced to 0 usd.
Should we have a better system? Yes, but many times there are real options out there.
Currently working through this with the local hospital and about $8k of various visits over the last 4 years of so while we had some mix of no insurance, garbage insurance and Medicaid (federally funded low income insurance) and it's literally all being wiped away. The lady who processes the applications explained to me that it's on a sliding scale, so if you make $1 over the threshhold for 100% waiver, it might be a 95% waiver. Notably some of the debt turned out to be a billing error where they should have billed Medicaid in the first place, but that was one of the smaller bills in the pile of debt