I’d like to know other non-US citizen’s opinions on your health care system are when you read a story like this. I know there are worse places in the world to receive health care, and better. What runs through your heads when you have a medical emergency?
A little background on my question:
My son was having trouble breathing after having a cold for a couple of days and we needed to stop and take the time to see if our insurance would be accepted at the closest emergency room so we didn’t end up with a huge bill (like 2000$-5000$). This was a pretty involved ~10 minute process of logging into our insurance carrier, and unsuccessfully finding the answer there. Then calling the hospital and having them tell us to look it up by scrolling through some links using the local search tool on their website. This gave me some serious pause, what if it was a real emergency, like the kind where you have no time to call and see if the closest hospital takes your insurance.
Both of you are thinking in terms of efficiency and not control. You’re dependent on your job to get health care. Lose your job? Better not get sick or hurt.
Of course the new thing is to not give employees too few hours so you legally don’t have to provide health insurance for them and make them pay for it themselves. Which is much more expensive.
Sure there’s Medicaid, but first you have to qualify. Then there’s different parts that cover different things and not others. You may also still have copays, deductibles, and other charges you still have to worry about.