Monday, February 02, 2015

You Have to Pay What Now?

This is how our insane healthcare system looks to people who lives in countries that have an actual healthcare system.

Even if you scrabble together enough money to get insurance, the policies can be incomprehensible with some of the cheaper policies, namely those with smaller monthly premiums, having limited cover with enormous “deductibles” – a sum of money (in some cases thousands of dollars) that must be paid before insurance cover kicks in and which comes on top of monthly charges.According to Linda Sharp, a board member at Doctors for Global Health, a not-for-profit organisation that exposes health inequities, this is just one glaring example of how even with Obamacare reforms accessing treatment can be beyond the reach of many people. 

Read more here: U.S. Style Healthcare.

2 comments:

Fie upon this quiet life! said...

One of my most conservative friends in California was a woman from Canada. But despite her socially conservative views on things that had no impact on her (like gay marriage) she was utterly confounded by the fact that our healthcare system is so screwed up. She constantly said that we need socialized medicine here in America. To her, it was a no brainer in a way that I thought was really compelling -- a sort of what would Jesus do? Too bad it didn't apply universally for her.

delagar said...

Our healthcare system really is screwed up.

The fact that so many parts of it are meant to turn a profit is the most ridiculous part of it, IMO.

We have all these solemnly pious proclamations about how end users (otherwise known as sick people, who are often fucking poor) have to be made to pay twenty dollars or thirty dollars or hundreds of dollars before they can access the healthcare that they are paying literally thousands of dollars in premiums for -- and YET: no one mentions, much less wonders at, the astounding profits that drug companies and insurance companies are making. And (some) hospitals and physicians.

WT serious F, indeed.