Reminds me of my grandmother: “The Depression wasn’t that bad. Your grandpa had a job. There were jobs out there. It was just the lazy people who couldn’t get jobs.”
I loved my grandma but she was more than a bit of a twit.
Hope things go better for you. 
Well, they basically closed down the base hospital … it is open basic day hours. No OB/GYN so even active duty have to go offbase and pay a freaking co-pay … if you need anything more than basic you need to go offbase, and pay the co-pay and that is ACTIVE DUTY. mrAru gets VA. He has to take the entire day of and hang out at the VA hospital to get seen. He finally said fuck it, got the insurance through his work and goes to my GP. The co pay is less than missing an entire day of work. My Aetna program rocks when combined with tricare. I rarely have any form of copay, but paying for tricare is fucking hosed. Rob worked his ass off for 20 years making less than minimum wage, on the promise of among other things medical care. Try to get medical care is more like it. I have to combine it with civillian insurance I pay for to get reasonable care. About the only benefit worth anything is free meds [as long as it is their pharmacopeia otherwise you are hosed.]
Well, lets see. My parathyroid removal was $10K for the hospital and doctor, another $5K ish for associated expenses [sedation, testing, meds and so forth]
I am type 2 diabetic, I get my metformin free, navy base dispensary gives it to me. I take byetta, original cost is $250 per month [30 day injector] Mycardis $52 per 28 pills in a bubblepack. testing supplies - 100 strips $78, lancets $12 per 100, Actonel 4 doses per month, $104. Norethindrone for my PCOS issues, $54 a month. Colchicine 30 doses [10 days] $15, indomethicin is $17 for 30, again a 10 day supply. I take the indocin and colchicine for 3 days when my pseudogout flares and stop before I get the mouth sores. I get about 1 flare a month, though I had 2 this month.
Id be handing over most of my income to various doctors and drugstores, on top of paying for my auto insurance and registration, and my portion of the mortgage and utilities for the house, my share of the groceries.
I broke my leg quite severely 12 years ago. Treatment over a period of 3 years or so involved 4 rounds of surgery, 2 weeks in the hospital, hundreds of hours of physical therapy, and scores of doctor appointments and X-rays and CT scans if I wanted to preserve my ability to walk. Total cost, after insurance discounts: about $100k, which was significantly more than my take-home pay for that period. I was just out of grad school and had zero savings to deal with an emergency like that. It was bad enough that I had to pay for the initial 2 days of treatment out-of-pocket (I had just started a new job and my insurance hadn’t kicked in yet); the hospital made me a payment plan, but it took me a couple of years to pay off just the first 2 days of emergency care. If I’d had to pay $100k, I literally would have had to declare bankruptcy.
So am I supposed to spend decades paying off expenses for a broken leg, so that I can preserve my ability to walk? Frequently the damage sustained by postponing medical treatment is irreversible; what you are talking about is simply not feasible for large numbers of people.
By saying that, you tell me that you have NO CLUE what medicine really costs.
The ignorance you just displayed is simply astonishing, on par with Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake”.
I don’t even know where to begin with your appalling statement. You just have no idea how much these things cost.
Self pay discounts? Yes - I’ve negotiated a few recently. It’s still amazing how much shit costs.
Hey, I approved a knee replacement for a patient today; he’ll get it at no cost to himself.
It was medically necessary, he’s pretty much wheelchair bound due to the severity of the knee and other problems. He’s deteriorated despite years of therapy, bracing, medications, and use of cane and crutches. With a new knee I expect he’ll be cruising fine with a cane pretty quick.
Incarcerated individuals: The only subset of Americans with a constitutional guarantee of goverment-paid, medically necessary health care.
Yes, it’s crazy. I know.
I shocked my insurance adjuster when I told her how much a lithotripsy costs.
Two kidney stones. One in each kidney. One golfball sized, one more like the size of a quarter. They were blocking the flow, and while it was not yet so much that I was in kidney failure, nor was kidney failure quite imminent, I was nevertheless being sent to the hospital As Soon As Possible.
The problem? My good job with good benefits kicked me to the curb because I was out all the time, going home after half a day nauseated and crying and unable to work. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me until finally – in the middle of the stones shifting again, in the middle of vomiting and sobbing in the doctor’s office as they tried to pour water down my throat before the MRI, after I’d taken yet another day off my new temp secretary job to see if this other test would work – they found the bastards. I told my new boss I would need surgery, I’d be out in no more than three days, the surgery was in two weeks. My contract was terminated the Friday before the surgery.
I was lucky: I had a doctor who was willing to do the procedure. I still owe him money: three thousand for the doctor, another fifteen hundred for the anesthesiologist, thirteen thousand for the hospital… soon you start talking about real money. I live with my parents now so I can pay it all off slowly.
But then there’s Bob. Bob walked everywhere because he couldn’t afford a bicycle, let alone a car. One day, he collapsed with a herniated disc. He had no insurance, so he lay on a gurney in the Catholic hospital down the road, screaming piteously and nearly pissing himself because the nurses wouldn’t even help him to the lavatory (we helped him, at last, and between him and the person helping him he collapsed and slipped and fell and really did lose control at that point. I have never forgiven that hospital and will never go there, not even if I am having a heart attack. Seton can get … mmph, I’m not in the Pit).
The only way Bob got help – after being prescribed pain medication to take like candy – was to find someone four states away willing to hire him temporarily so he could get health insurance. Wonder of wonders, now he can walk without a cane and without horrible pain.
The point is this: you cannot plan for medical emergencies. It is morally bankrupt to advise people to get stuffed when they have slow wasting conditions or problems that make it impossible to work. It’s idiotic and, in the long run, more expensive to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. If I had not found a sympathetic doctor, I would have had to wait until my kidneys began to fail so I could be put into dialysis and THEN get the same damned procedure done. If done at the taxpayer’s expense, it would be ten or so times more than fifteen thousand dollars.
So: rather than cure the sick and make it possible for them to be productive citizens, we give them painkillers and tell them to stick it out, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and have the foresight to have health insurance next go-round. It seems that by ‘emergency’, we mean ‘death is imminent’.
Regarding the “move to another country” concept… do countries that have socialized medicine (or universal healthcare or whatever you call it) give it to any legal immigrant right away? Or do you have to have lived there for a while?
You qualify for free treatment as soon as you arrive in the UK for the following:
Treatment given in an accident and emergency (A&E) department or in an NHS walk-in centre that provides services similar to those of an A&E department.
Treatment for certain infectious diseases (but for HIV/AIDS only the first diagnosis and counselling that follows it are free).
Compulsory psychiatric treatment.
Family planning services.
With permanent leave to remain, you get access to all the health services, and if you’re on a low income you may also qualify for benefits (free prescriptions etc).
With temporary leave to remain, you don’t get access to everything but you still qualify for the majority of your healthcare (including registering with a GP).
A British National may be refused certain treatments if they live outside of the UK. So coverage isn’t based on your citizenship, but residency.
You might qualify for MedicAid. You need to do research, but there are ways to get discounts and assistance.
Both my SILs had no insurance and no income. One had breast cancer and the other suffered from severe alcoholism. The alcoholic’s husband is now suffering from congestive heart failure and is also getting care. They got discounted drugs from the manufacturers, found doctors who would give them a break on the bills. I realize these don’t fall in the same category as knee replacement, but there are ways to significantly reduce your costs.
I had another friend who fell off the back of a boat and his leg was cut nearly completely off by the propeller. His friends threw a fundraiser kegger party to assist him with his medical bills. I know that’s not everyone’s cup o’ tea, but it worked.
It takes some digging, but with a little luck, you’ll stumble across something that’ll help close the gap somewhat. Good luck.
Sorry…scratch the MedicAid part.
Just wanted to address this, seeing as there tends to be so much ignorance floating around regarding military medical care. I’m an active duty USAF nurse, and I worked for two years in a primary care clinic, handling exactly this sort of thing. If an active duty person is referred by their tricare-assigned primary care provider to a tricare-approved specialist they DO NOT pay a copay. At all. Ever.
There are occasions where an active duty person will go to a specialist without a referral, or to one not approved by tricare, and then they do pay out of pocket.