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.