Is this an American post im too European to understand?
Yes. Medical care is so batshit insanely expensive in the US that people often drive themselves to the ER in the most dire circumstances because it’s more economical to risk dying on the way than to call an ambulance that would basically bankrupt them. I heard that an ambulance can cost upwards of $3000.
Insurance companies put you on a “plan” which means you are paying a hefty sum each month/quarter for dubious pay-off. You always have to pay medical bills yourself if they are below a threshold that is set in your plan, that’s the deductible. After reaching that, the insurance company will provide a partial payment of the excess if, and only if, your plan covers it. What matters here is choice of hospital (your insurance of course doesn’t cover every hospital), form of treatment (your insurance of course doesn’t cover all drugs or treatments), whether it was an emergency or not, etc. It’s a scam, but you need to go with it or you risk not getting healthcare at all.
The best part is that it’s not even that large of a bill compared to what you can receive after using the insurance that you pay hundreds of dollars every month to have.
Believe it or not, dying is also expensive.
Not to you it isn’t
Yeah but you are dead why do you care?
You care about the family you leave behind, that will need to deal with it.
Did you ever vote Republican? If so, that’s why.
The only Republican I ever voted for was Arnold Swartzenegger when he was running for governor of California.
And now I get to have a ferret as a pet legally in this state. So all in all it was a win.
You can have one in Colorado too; no problem there. Plus: skiing, (mostly) better air, hiking everywhere, and multiple brewpubs in every town it seems.
Downsides: The Colorado Rockies are your team, and the first-frost car accidents when Texans and Californians are on the road.
Then why am I still dealing with it? Voted dem this whole time and I don’t get the exemption??
Oh, come on! Because others keep voting Republican and blocking Dem efforts for any kind of health reform. Let’s not play games here - we KNOW why.
My first election was 2000, Gore V Bush, 18 years old I wanted to vote for Nader, but was assured that if I did Bush would win and America would be ruined. I listened to those “wiser” than me and voted for Gore and yet…
Mine was 2004 so I am pretty much going to spend the rest of my life paying for a war I was too young to have a voice in while the fuckers who voted for it are doing fine.
You did the right thing, and if the Supreme Court was less corrupt, or if a thousand more young Floridian had voted for Gore, he could have possibly won. In a statewide recount that tried to consistently resolve every ballot dispute, Gore just barely won. He won the popular vote, and would have helped us greatly on the issue of climate change and the environment. He would have done some of the shit things Bush did after 9/11, but probably wouldn’t have been gung-ho about Iraq. If he unified the country similar to Bush, he might have boosted his party’s popularity and gotten better legislation passed.
Bush appointed two conservative justices, did all the shit things Republicans always do. If a Republican won in 2008 following the financial crisis, a Republican might have been blamed for a terrible recovery instead of Obama, and Bernie might have had a better chance at getting elected. Trump might never have gotten such a popularity boost from racists reacting to a Black president. Things could have drastically changed if Florida flipped blue.
Gore lost because Janet Reno decided to hand that kid over to Cuba and did it the Janet Reno way which is to send full SWAT into a situation that doesn’t come even close to calling for it. The same Janet Reno who launched her career on the Satanic daycare worker panic that resulted in suicides and homosexuals being falsely arrested. This is a woman who claimed to believe that daycares were having satanic orgies.
My first vote and I voted 3rd party for Anderson. Reagan beat Carter and the rest is downward US history.
You can vote for your Cinderella candidate, but in the end sometimes the better choice is the one where they’re better positioned to make the little changes. Enough little changes move the ship where it needs to go. Big changes are nearly impossible to pull off.
Big changes are nearly impossible to pull off.
That’s what’s needed though. i’m not voting for cinderella, I’m voting for better. Even if it isn’t going to happen.
America finds itself with the cancer of christian fascism metastasizing in it’s heart and without radical change the bad times are coming. Biden isn’t the guy, Biden is the pre-ascendant fascist status quo trying to hold on for one last gasp.
That status quo does not by definition have the ability to fight the monster, born of inequity and decay, that it created…
The us could use it, but barring a war on its own soil, you’re not going to get it anytime soon. All you can work towards is small changes that accumulate.
You can claim “status quo” all you want but it’s just the same as “not voting sends a message” - it enables the people already there to continue, and honestly, too old or whatever, Biden is the best we’ve got right now.
There’s a great article on NPR about Adam Kinzinger and why he has left politics for now. I’m a Democrat, but I agree with him:
I also know that if everything kind of tracks the way it is in 2024, I won’t be voting Republican because, again, I think it’s a simple question of democracy or no democracy. And the Republican Party represents right now a real slide to authoritarianism … If it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s any question I would vote for Joe Biden.
You can wait for the perfect politician all you want, but I’m not letting the cult slip into power and fuck us all up again.
PS: Also, calling Biden a “pre-ascendant facist” - NO. Absolutely not. Not sure where your politics come from, but it’s not any sense of reality. Go live in borderline democracy, or China or Russia (or their adjacent states) and then rethink your definitions.
Also, calling Biden a “pre-ascendant facist” - NO. Absolutely not.
First let me clear this up, I mean that Biden represents the previous status quo, which has led us to a current status quo where the fascist are ascendant.
The status quo that Biden represents with it’s primacy of shareholder power over every other part of society has led has led us here because it causes inequity and decay. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then desperate, then fascist…
I’ve long ago given up “not voting sends a message,” just come to peace with the fact that voting for the people that caused the problem will not fix the problem.
Biden is at best a delaying action from the bad times which are inevitable at this point.
If the bad times are coming let them come, because in the meantime the fascists are eating away like termites, like cancer, at the structures of our society, more people are becoming desperate and destitute rife for recruitment, delaying it doesn’t save us, it just makes them stronger.
My point is that it’s not a party divide, both sides have interest in keeping status quo. It’s not just “because you voted Republican” it’s the whole thing, top to bottom. And I’m not saying both sides are completely the same, just that it’s more than a bit reductive to say it’s because of a party line.
That’s bogus and you should know it by now. Democrats have since Obama been pushing for a universal health care system, but Republicans keep killing portions and driving in middle-men HMOs.
But hey - you blame who you want. I have good health care now that I left the US. You keep arguing…I’m sure that’ll fix everything one day.
Universal Healthcare doesn’t have 100% buy in from democrats. If it did they would have passed it under Obama.
The current president isn’t republican and people are still people thousands of dollars for basic procedures.
You do know how creating a bill works, right? House, then Senate, then to the President for signing…? The President doesn’t work by edict - this is a democracy, and all parts need to work together. The Republican-led lower House had for decades been too busy creating chaos and not taking their responsibilities to the American people seriously. They support their donors.
The last healthcare laws were 100% democrats, things that are fucked are that way because of them.
Poor deluded person. Mostly though…poor.
But enjoy your blindness and rage.
It’s not like you have much of a choice, lol.
The democrats are just blue Republicans. You people should start voting 3rd parties.
you might have to defeat the entire point of insurance and talk to the hospital yourself
Don’t pay. Make them fight you. If we all refuse to pay the system collapses.
I went to the ER, saw a doctor for like 2 minutes, they have me a diagnosis that turned out to be incredibly wrong, prescribed me expensive medicine that I didn’t need and wasn’t covered by insurance, and costing me a ton on unnecessary specialist visits and tests.
They had the gall to ask me for an extra 2 grand in the mail a few weeks after my visit.
They ain’t getting shit.
The charged me $1k after saying literally: “Well I can see something is wrong with it, but it’s not broken, so I’m going to give you some Tylenol”.
That was 9 years ago. My shoulder has been dislocated ever since.
The hospital sells medical debt at a fraction of the bill to recoup their actual costs, which are often times in the $100 range. The debt collector goes after you for years until you pay, they give up, or a small chance they take you to court, where you pay.
If you don’t pay, the debt collectors are only out a fraction of the debt anyway. Frightening one person into paying up pays for 10 people who don’t from the debt collector’s perspective.
Unfortunately, not paying them is accounted for by the system.
Other than one meal a week I go meatless. This won’t end global warming. This is what I can do.
This is such an US post.
Was gonna say that too. This doesn’t apply to everywhere, mostly that one place with all the school shootings and stuff.
