You are misinformed about waiting lists in Canada. There are no waiting lists to see your GP for an infection - you make an appointment just like in the US. There are no waiting lists for emergency care - you are triaged and seen to depending on the seriousness of your complaint.
Of course you can’t see your GP instantly, and of course you can’t get into emergency instantly for every complaint. But this is the same situation as in the US.
Only a fool tells someone, “Hey, lookit what a guy did in a movie! You can do that too!”
I’m not saying a poor or down-on-his-luck guy should just toss up his hands and not hussle. But you can still be that down-on-your-luck guy, living in train station bathrooms and flaking out on cab fare, and STILL be hussling. Exactly like the guy in “Pursuit of Happyness”. He was one bad staph infection or hit-and-run accident away from “Pursuit of Permanent Destitution and Being a Burden on Society.”
Some people have a “fair world” hypothesis, whereby if you work hard enough, eventually things shake out right. This is not true…and even if it were true, “eventually” is the key word. Eventually can be a few months or several years. You can’t know where in the “eventually” you are…or someone else is.
We could all be making more money doing something we aren’t currently doing. I don’t fault the OP for not making a gazillion dollars…because in our economy it is impossible for everyone to make that much money. Someone is always going to be at the bottom of the totem pole in a capitalistic society…so telling some random guy he can move out of there with individual effort doesn’t really fix the problem of people being unable to afford insurance. For every guy like the OP who didn’t have insurance and made some bad decisions, there’s a guy who doesn’t have insurance who’s pinching his pennies and making all the right choices…and yet he’s still gonna have to go to the emergency room when his appendix bursts or when he gets mugged in an alley coming home from work or after he breaks his leg trying to fix a broken light fixture. Are you gonna tell him to go get a welders license too? Does that really advance the dialogue here about a big swath of the community not having insurance?
Since as a society we have decided that we will not decline seeing a sick person at an ER if they have no insurance,then we have to deal with the consequences of that decision. There are two ways to handle those consequences: let the uninsured guy dangle until his small problem becomes a great problem that then allows him access to the emergency room (costing you and me a helluva lot of ) or give UHC to all to prevent these things from deteriorating in the first place (preventative care - also costs me you and me but not as much as first option). Seems to be a no-brainer - just like our politicians.
Dude, your actions were the height of total fucking stupidity. You brought that whole mess down on your own head by being a drunk and being stupid enough to “bum” antibiotics off people who were stupid enough to give them to you, thereby allowing your system to build up a tolerance to them.
Ever heard of a free clinic? If you had gone there instead to the ER, your costs would have been way less. I’m sorry for your situation, but seriously dude - if you’re only making 11 clams an hour, fucking yourself up on alcohol isn’t the smart thing to do.
You get about a 1.5 on the PityMeter.
Here’s the thing- nobody’s saying it’s a sin, just that it’s a colossally stupid choice to spend $200 on booze and cigs if you have an infected tooth, even if you’re self medicated.
There are consequences from choices like that, and obviously, one of them is for that infection to get worse.
THAT is why I’m fairly unsympathetic. His actions point at a pattern of continual bad decision making and actions as well as disregard for the consequences of those choices and actions.
Had it been one bad choice, or even two, I’d probably have been a lot more sympathetic, but in this case, it’s a pattern, and considering that good decision making is something I take very seriously, it’s frustrating that the public had to pay for the relatively minor and cheap problem or the emergent catastrophe.
Had he made the proper choices, or even some of the proper choices, he wouldn’t have been in that particular boat, and could have afforded to go to the doctor or an urgent care clinic or whatever.
It’s not the drinking itself that’s bad; I have no problem with drinking, but I do have a problem with drinking when it starts to impact your ability to provide for you and yours. If you can afford it, financially or socially, have at it. I’ll even recommend liquors for you. But if you can’t, then you don’t have any business doing it, and shouldn’t expect me to pick up the tab if you do.
Oddly, I’m not against universal health care- ultimately, it’s a pragmatic cost-saving thing, and something that would improve public health.
What I’m against is insulation from the consequences of your own bad choices. This guy did a number of short-sighted and selfish things, and then bitches when he face-plants as a result.
There is a vast and tremendous gulf between making perfect choices and being an alcoholic.
Why do you have such a desperate need to attempt and justify this guys behavior?
Yeah. I mean, if the guy had been numbing the dental pain with Bacardi, wouldn’t he have told us so?
Also, he says he’s been drinking heavily for a few years now, multiple times a week. If you’ve got pain that severe and long-lasting, common sense should tell you you’ve got problems that all the Bacardi in the world can’t lessen.
That’s why all this rationalizing is just a red-herring. All the self-medication stuff for the OP might be true, but talking about it doesn’t advance the discussion. It actually makes proponents of UHC look kinda crazy. Everyone has a reason for the bad decisions they make, right? People who like to race fast cars have a thing for the thrill and the adrenaline, which probably helps them deal with the crappiness of their crappy lives. The solution UHC folks are proposing doesn’t deal with fixing their crappy lives though. It’s not going to give people more hope or put more money in their bank accounts or get them out of scrubbing toilets at the end of their shifts. So unless people want to establish a utopia where the world is painless and no one will have an urge to engage in wreckless behavior to have cheap fun, then it makes no sense to keep pounding this drum. It’s an excuse for individual behavior, but has no place in a discussion about why we need UHC.
Exactly.
Arguing about whether the OP is “worthy” of healthcare makes proponents of UHC defend him and detractors of UHC demonize him until everyone sound like an ass.
We need UHC because everyone deserves adequate healthcare.
I didn’t know this until a (male) friend of ours got sick. He probably should be on SSI/Disability, but isn’t (he was in a car accident which left him brain damaged, but functional). He has no children and works a similar job to the OP with no health coverage. I find it ridiculous that he has to worry about paying a doctor’s bill when he can barely pay for rent, food and transportation.
What you aren’t seeing is that as a nation we are jon138. If we would stop making the poor choice of denying basic healthcare to people who can’t/won’t pay for it and instead institute a proper UHC policy it would save us money and keep our citizens healthier so that they can continue to contribute to society. Instead we choose to force people to suffer a traumatic injury or make a series of massively dumb choices before we are willing to put in the funding to help them, increasing the amount we pay as insurance holders and taxpayers. This decision is the national equivalent of drinking Bacardi every day instead of using that money to go to the dentist.
We are cutting off our national nose to spite our face. There are consequences for this choice, one of which is that the OP ended up costing tens of thousands of dollars instead of a couple hundred bucks. That isn’t even the consequence I’m worried about. If he can’t or won’t look at his budget and find a way to pay for health care then he is taking contagious germs out in public and spreading them around. Do you trust that the person who was groping the apple display at the grocery store before you walked in has health insurance and isn’t out shopping with the flu or worse? Do you trust that the people coughing on you at work aren’t bumming antibiotics off of strangers or buying them from Mexico and are taking their meds properly so as not to create a strain of superbacteria that are harder to kill?
If we have UHC (and I’m a strong proponent of it), all the judgemental stuff goes out the window. At least one major point of it is to prevent the long-run costs of health conditions that worsen over time–whether it is due to the nature of the health problem or bad decision-making on the part of the client.
DianaG, sit down–I agree with you on this one. 
Having seen this type of argument go 'round and 'round before, I tend to believe it doesn’t matter how pristine the OP’s choices had been, there would still be folks dropping by to point out that you can simply: a. make more money. b. don’t get sick so much. c. get a better job/go back to school/move to where money grows on trees and everyone makes more than the median income. d. go back in time and not have children this time around…etc. I don’t understand that response no matter how many times I see it.
The alcohol had nothing to do with bumming antibiotics off other people. I know all too many sober people who do the same damn thing. Either they’re taking half what they’re prescribed and saving the rest for “just in case” or trading them for something else or handing them out to a sick friend of family member.
Sure, you can get free (or very low cost) antibiotics these days, but that hasn’t been happening very long so the habit of hoarding and doling out old antibiotics hasn’t gone away yet. And, again, you have to be able to afford to see a doctor FIRST to get the necessary Rx. No money for doctor, no Rx, no free antibiotics.
Probably not. By the time his liver is starting go haywire all a “free clinic” is going to do is tell him to go to an ER because you can’t treat that as an outpatient.
As it happens, there are NO free clinics where I live. I guess in the name of promoting some sort of “responsibility” or fearing poor people will got a clinic for amusement and entertaining medical procedures, ALL of the clinics in my area charge a fee to see a doctor. ALL of them. Maybe there are genuine free clinics where the OP lives, maybe not, I don’t know.
While the OP was drinking, the fact he seem to give up alcohol rather easily and has reported he doesn’t have cravings would tend to indicate he is NOT an alcoholic. Certainly, the quantity of booze, and the cost, were contributing his problems but it would be presumptuous to diagnosis addiction over the internet.
Because so many other people here seem desperate to take a dump on his head, tell him he deserves to suffer, and perhaps would even be content if he had died or been permanently crippled by his mistake.
Among the nothings the Obama health care did was provide 11 billion dollars over 5 years for community health care facilities. You pay on a sliding scale according to how much money you earn. They are busy but provide health care to the poor. They do not provide dental care though.
You can expect a bill from the hospital. they do not supply services for free.
I think it’s because people are naturally afraid that this type of catastrophe might just happen to them. They insulate themselves from this harsh reality by convincing themselves that the illness is REALLY the fault of the other individual.
Illness could NEVER happen to them because THEY don’t make the poor life choices. They have health coverage because of the great choices they made.
If someone can get into a bad situation merely through bad luck, that means it could happen to YOU! That fact makes folks uncomfortable, so they look for reasons why they are superior to the victim.
Looking from afar (the UK), I find the state of US healthcare provision absolutely disgusting. Even if you have good healthcare how can you live in a country where there is so much more than enough to go around and have some many people, without adequate healthcare provision?
The Republcians in particualr disgust me, if you could condense everythign that is wrong with America into a pure black lump of fetid evil then you’d get the Republican party.
I worked with a woman who’s father waited for at least a year for heart by-pass surgery because of delays in the Canadian system. He was delayed seeing a doctor and subsequently delayed in treatment. This wasn’t an isolated incident and he may just as easily have been one of the people in this article. When I talked to her last his condition had deteriorated to the point they wouldn’t operate.
"In 1999, Dr. Richard F. Davies described how delays affected Ontario heart patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. In a single year, just for this one operation, 71 Ontario patients died before surgery, “121 were removed from the list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery” and 44 left the province to have their CABG surgery elsewhere, often in the U.S. "
It’s nice that wealthy Canadian politicians can fly to the US for medical attention that’s needed in a timely manner. I would prefer to have the same options.
Medicaid has always provided medical care for the poor.
And if you’re not poor enough for medicaid, and cannot get insurance or have been the victim of recission of your policy, then the hospital will bill you.
Well that would be part of the changes made by Congress which has been discussed at length and for which nobody disagrees is helpful. To the extent the full force of the bill has affected business remains to be seen. It doesn’t help if more people lose their jobs and fall into the cracks that exists above the poverty line.
It would be nice if Canada’s system worked as advertised but it’s flaws affect the middle class more than the US. On the flip side, it helps the near poor better than the US. I’d say the poor in the US fair better than the poor in Canada.