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.
Why does your government not want a healthy work force? Healthy workers are more productive. Even with the right wing focus of your entire government, having healthy workers just feels like a no brainer.
Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:
Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn’t “want” a healthy work force, but that it isn’t capable of setting any sort of a policy.
The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed “health reform” which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.
In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama’s “ACA” law is “bad”. There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I’m not counting the anti-abortion laws as “health care” – they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats’ position has been a mix of “we shouldn’t let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!” and “the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced”.
We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).
Also a worker that doesn’t have to waste time on bureaucracy and healthcare considerations has more time to be productive.
Both of you are thinking in terms of efficiency and not control. You’re dependent on your job to get health care. Lose your job? Better not get sick or hurt.
Of course the new thing is to not give employees too few hours so you legally don’t have to provide health insurance for them and make them pay for it themselves. Which is much more expensive.
Sure there’s Medicaid, but first you have to qualify. Then there’s different parts that cover different things and not others. You may also still have copays, deductibles, and other charges you still have to worry about.