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.
I’m from the US, and I moved to Canada for 4 years for work. As a young adults, my partner and I had revolving medical debt. Not a ton, but enough to make it annoying. A couple thousand here and there. It felt like I was always had a hospital bill that we were trying to pay off. When we moved to Canada it was weird for us because, just as another person in here stated, you just didn’t have to think about going to the doctor. I had major stomach surgery, we had a kid, we got monetary support for our other kid who’s on the spectrum to take them to therapy… We got gtube supplies, meds for infections… Anything we needed was covered. Not once did I think oh man, this is going to wreck us. Well, that’s not true, I thought that the first time I took my oldest to the doctor to get an xray because we thought they might have broken a bone, but that was just a thought and it didn’t actually cost us a penny.
Every time we went to our PCP, a specialist, or emergency, the only thing we had to pay for was parking and maybe a few bucks for pain meds. But each time we had to get pills it was less than $5 to fill the prescription. One of the kids fell and hit their head? Straight to the doctor. A cold that’s been taking too long to go away on its own? To the doctor!
Now we are back in the US, and I just paid off another medical bill because my insurance only covered a small amount of an ECG, because they wanted to check make sure my kids heart was strong enough to put her on medication, and that the meds wouldn’t kill her.
We should move to a single payer medical system.
I regularly fear for the Americans I have connected to since the days of covid stretched my group of friends more into online spaces.
One got beaten to shit by a bad boss when he tried to retrieve his tips. All at once he had injuries that kept him out of work, mental trauma and legitimate fear for his safety that meant he couldn’t return to his job but also because work and insurance are tied down there he was in an immediate precarity. He couldn’t return to work, the cops showed active disinterest in helping him press charges and his hospital bills blew through his savings… And because he had technically quit there was no EI safety net either.
I was struck so hard by the dystopian nature of it all. There is so much under the Canadian system which is just never a factor. I didn’t realize how free I actually was because I had never tied my considerations of my health to what job I chose or whether I was unemployed. I was used to my medical services bill just being this tiny expense I had set to autopay that was so small I didn’t even have to think about. They don’t even charge that any more.
All I ever had to do to get help was ask and it was freely given. I had no cause to ever question exactly how much of a blessing… How much of a privilege… that actually was.
Living in Europe, it’s easy to forget how much is covered by the national health insurance. I just had one tooth fixed, another pulled a few months ago, and getting a dental X-ray done in a few weeks. All 100% covered. My whole family got their COVID vaccines for free. My grandmother has issues with mobility, so the hospital sent a car to our house with her vaccines for free. I can just take a bike to the doctor and get a diagnosis or papers for further examination for free.
This is why I’m happy to pay taxes. I know that crooked politicians take their unfair share, but it also funds public services like healthcare.