I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system?
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.
We moved from America to see Asia years ago. We were just talking last week about how racist we still catch ourselves being. We have a sick relative at home who we talked about moving here. They'd be close to us so we could help. And healthcare here is cheap/free often and pretty good.
But there's part of me that just thinks American = superior. No matter how long I live here I'm not sure it will ever go away. It's been psychopathically programmed into me. "Yeah it's expensive, but at least you're getting a good doctor". (I've had awful and great doctors in both countries) It's infuriating to realize.
Good on you for realising though. I mean from an outsiders perspective America tends to push the exceptionalism narrative pretty hard, live there long enough and it'll get into you sooner or later.
You were conditioned, you’re not being racist. It would be racist if, say, you lived in the US and had an Asian doctor and demanded a white one.
Also:
This really made me laugh. It’s hard to describe what I’m imagining, but, remember in the first matrix where they “download” information via needle in the back of the head? And you know how a video game character looks when the game is glitching? Like, one character is just freaking out, all of their animations happening at once? Kinda like two cartoon characters fighting in a cloud of smoke and limbs and heads just flying out random places? Well, I imagined a mixture of those two (three?) things. And dammit if I didn’t get a hearty chuckle out of it.