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.
Well it’s not that it means nothing to me, but my job in the US pays about $30k more than it would in Germany (I can’t speak to other countries). Lots of Germans come to the US to work in my field for that reason (well they used to before all the layoffs). Also my health insurance is free.
That said, I absolutely still want public healthcare. Not just for the people in my country who desperately need it, but for myself too. Because while my healthcare is “free”, it isn’t really; my salary could be higher otherwise. And I lose coverage if I stop working (actually not really we have programs for that, but still kind of).