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.
Honestly, I am so glad my parents didn’t move to the USA and moved to the UK instead. Me and my sister had several health issues including asthma, food allergies, broken bones playing sports, and as a result several hospital and doctor visits. Considering my parents were self employed shop keepers, I don’t know if we’d be alive, let alone what sort of life we would have had. Then also having to pay for college would’ve been tricky. Having so few work holidays also completely sucks!
We are now both professionals with great jobs, paying lots of taxes and volunteer a lot to try to give back. Would that be possible in the USA - I honestly have no idea! Would we move to the USA - absolutely no way! We’d both actually earn lots more money in the USA in the same role but factoring in health and happiness, it’s not worth it.
When you hear “greatest country on earth” and “the American dream”, I think anybody in Western countries really roll their eyes. It’s not a utopia here in the UK but nobody claims it to be, and stories like this just prove we are better off here.
However, we know the people themselves are great and don’t deserve this position. We feel sorry for you and wish part of your population would travel and see things for themselves to push for changes back home.
In the UK, we are terrified that we will end up in the same position as our out of touch political elite and ultra wealthy would love to copy this.