05-06-2022, 02:41 PM
(05-06-2022, 10:10 AM)KillerGoose Wrote: Healthcare in the U.S. is going to become a hotter topic with every election cycle, I think. I broke my finger a few years back and it required surgery to repair. The total cost of the surgery was $34,000. I had insurance, so I only had to pay $3k-4k, but still. For people that don't have insurance, that could cripple them. A guy I know tore his ACL in a touch football game. He had no insurance, so he never got it repaired and he works a factory job. It's nuts. An ex-girlfriend of mine had brain surgery before we had met. She told me her family was millions of dollars in medical debt. After we broke up, she had to have brain surgery again, and then she got ***** cancer. She is doing just fine now, but I can't even imagine how much medical debt they are in.
I always like to add anecdotes to my posts when possible. My wife works in healthcare. We have been together for several years now and I remember us having a discussion about healthcare when she was in college. She's a conservative, I'm not. Her stance at the time was essentially "yeah, healthcare is expensive but the care is also top quality. You pay for what you get. I don't think we should have socialized healthcare." Now, she has been in the field for a few years now and gone through COVID and experienced some very tough things.
On this particular topic, she has completely flipped her stance. We speak about it frequently, but she said that she has seen patients come to tears when learning how expensive a treatment is, or hearing stories from people who haven't been to the doctor for years because they can't afford it which has led to their condition becoming substantially worse. It's all sad. I would really like to see some progress on this in particular.
Best in the world eh?
Must be why our infant mortality rate is so high.
