That’s worser than I thought :-( I was thinking that $1400 is too pricey to anybody — turns out that it was higher for people who don’t have insurance.
> For the United States you are responsible for your medical costs
Is this a culture/mind difference, or does everybody in the US doesn’t like this but has no time to fix it? Genuinely interested, as most people in our country almost everybody relies on only the default insurance — is this a cultural difference between the US(western world) and here? Are countries in the Europe similar?
Poor public administration makes people lose trust in government, which contributes to political debate.
This is a vicious cycle.
As applied to healthcare, many Americans, including leftists, simply aren’t confident the government can achieve major public programs.
Obamacare is a good example: it has been slowly gutted. How? By litigating it again and again at different levels and forums of government.
After congress passed the law, states had to agree to go along, courts federal courts had to sign off, stage courts had to sign off, etc.
There’s no way to enact major changes in American society anymore.
So most Americans, very logically and rationally, favor small incremental changes over big programs.
This is just the way it is. We don't know anything else and when you start talking about changing it a lot of people lash out and can get quite heated.
Our government is not the best at managing things efficiently, socialized medicine means it gets paid via taxes, the medical and drug companies have lobbyists and can largely get away with setting whatever prices they want right now, etc.
Personally I'd be fairly hesitant to get on board with socialized medicine here in the United States purely for the fact I would fear it would be just as corrupt and I don't know if the increased taxes would be more than I pay for my insurance currently considering my employer pays more of the cost of my insurance than I do and I doubt that sudden savings would be passed on to me as increased pay.
He's giving you false information, that's not actually true.
If you are poor you don't usually have a deductible in your insurance (because it's government subsidized), which means you are responsible for LESS of the bill, not more.
People have a lot of false views on US healthcare, mainly because it's a political issue, so people have a strong motivation to spin it one way or another.
The individual in that article likely had reasonably good insurance, someone earning minimum wage likely would have insurance that would cover very little if anything and they'd likely owe the entire 3* amount.
The countries doing lots of testing are basically countries with socialized medicine, the cost is being passed on to the tax payers. For the United States you are responsible for your medical costs, if you are fortunate you have good insurance that will cover varying percentages of your medical insurance.
I have 'good' insurance, several years ago I required hospitalization and ended up incurring somewhere between 13 and 15k USD in bills for about 30 hours in the hospital and the ambulance ride. I ended up paying something like 12-13% of that. At a start I personally owed 100 USD for every single doctor that touched my case which ended up being 5 doctors if I recall correctly, only 3 of which I ever met. In this instance the hospital was very courteous and allowed me to set up a payment plan and repay them, interest free, over many months. I paid the debt off over a year and a half if I recall correctly.
They then wanted more blood over the next several days and had to see a primary care physician to get my medical leave paperwork filled out and those two things cost me another 200-300 USD after insurance.