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.
The institutionalization runs deep.
The first time I moved out of the US I lived in a socialized medicine country & I just never went to the doctor. My then girlfriend casually went because she wasnt feeling well (a cold), then would go to the pharmacy for a birth control shot (no prescription needed), and finally when I had a fever and a doc came to the house at 2am (we just had to pay the taxi). I had a lengthy stay in the hospital, and a month of rehab, my employer’s nurse would stop by the house and give me an injection on his way home. And our son was born in a hospital with private rooms- all i had to pay for was my meals and overnight stay (there was a bed for me), plus the room had a mini bar…no shit.
We moved back to the US to raise the kids and then out again i to another socialized medicine country and I STILL HESITATE to go to the doctors.