First post that summarizes all previous posts:
Medicine and Healing for profit is a criminal activity.
In Australia you’d be treated for any life threatening injuries no questions asked and then billed. However at a public hospital the bill would be pretty reasonable ( compared to US hospital pricing).
From personal experience:
Madrid, 1988 - I was a student and therefore supposed to be covered by the national insurance, but my program wasn’t very efficient and we hadn’t gotten our cards yet. I came down with strep throat; I’d had it a bunch of times before and knew the symptoms well. I wandered around the neighborhood in a feverish fog, trying to go to any clinic I came across and pay out of pocket, but nobody knew what to do with me because they simply weren’t used to dealing with cash.
Finally I ended up in the ER of a local hospital, where a doctor took pity on me, looked down my throat, and told me what I already knew - I had strep. He gave me a prescription for antibiotics and some kind of tablet with mega-doses of Vitamin C and aspirin that you dropped into a glass of water and it fizzed. When I tried to pay, he said it wasn’t worth it for him to deal with money because they weren’t set up for it, and told me to go away. I was much better within 24 hours.
Same thing in England, maybe 6 - 7 years ago; foot pain, I was worried about a stress fracture, my college roomie (who lives there) got me in to see her GP the same day. She examined me, told me I had plantar fascitis, and that I should stay off the foot for a few days, ice it, and use some ointment that I could buy OTC for a pound. They had told me I would need to pay 20GBP for the visit because I wasn’t covered on the NHS, which I would have gladly paid, but in the end they also told me to go away because it was too much hassle to deal with taking my money.
Luckily, I’ve never had to deal with anything really serious while traveling.
That’s probably because it looks so totally alien to Germans to pay medical expenses by credit card - it’s probably only some few doctors with a large foreign clientele, or hospitals catering to rich Arabs etc. who are even set up to receive credit card payments.
So nurses should work for free?
If you come to Japan and get sick, you will be billed at 100% of the cost. They have you settle the bill before you are discharged. You can sneak out of the hospital, I guess, but then you had better be on the plane really, really fast.
In Mexico I had to go give them a credit card prior to having them see my wife. (It turns out my company’s insurance would have covered her to, but I didn’t know that at the time.)
When you work for a non-profit organization, it doesn’t mean you work for free. It just means there are no profits. Any money earned is used for the operation of the entity.
Most famous private universites, such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, are non-profit. That doesn’t mean their professors work for free.
That’s quite often the outcome for minor stuff - they’re not set up to deal with it, they don’t have the time to dig out the forms, it’s a hassle. (It’s very likely that some will “charge” $20 which will then buy donuts or local equivalent for the breakroom.)
However, there are exceptions: If you break a limb at a ski resort in the Alps, for instance, the local clinics will (expertly) X-ray, set and cast it, write the necessary information for your own physician directly on the cast (won’t get lost), hand you an information package with X-rays etc. - and they most certainly expect payment, be it insurance information, credit cards, traveler’s checks or cash.
But individuals who happen to work for medical institutions do make a profit, which we call “wages”, regardless of whether the organisation they work for also makes a profit. If the arrangement wasn’t personally profitable to the individuals, they wouldn’t do the work. I don’t see why it is “evil” when an organisation makes profit out of providing healthcare, but it’s perfectly OK when an individual such as a nurse or doctor does it.
If you wish to confide your healthcare to “professionals” who have a profit motive, that is your choice.
I see a huge difference between profit motive and “earning a wage”.
Fair enough. I don’t see a huge difference. You can argue that certain people do certain jobs for not entirely selfish reasons. But I don’t see how you make the leap to “making money out of healthcare is a crime”. The fact remains that people such as nurses do exactly that.
Here’s an example dear to my heart (no pun intended) Blood pressure. Or better said, high blood pressure. For decades since the early 20th century normal systolic pressure was considered to be 100 + your age. In the 1970s, the target limit for initiating drug treatment was 160/95. This has now become 140/90, more recently, 115/75, with a large number of national organizations listed as approving this new move.
By moving the goal posts, you constantly create a market of millions of newly “sick” people or people who are “pre-HBP” and thus need to take meds. Most doctors listen to what they read or are told by drug reps. They are not scientists who conduct tests.
So there is profit in illness. It pervades the industry.
You aren’t understanding the situation here. No one is saying nurses should work for free. And in all the above countries they don’t, they earn wages.
What you’re missing is that America has an additional layer where:
[ol]
[li]Money goes in.[/li][li]Nurses, doctors and other personnel are paid.[/li][li]Overhead is paid.[/li][li]Additional money is sent to share holders and not spent on nurses, doctors or overhead.[/li][/ol]
The crime (and I’m aware it isn’t actually a crime) is adding an additional layer of money extraction that does absolutely nothing to help patients. It’s stupid, it’s backward and there is no rational reason for us as a country to support it.
Look at an insurance company. They receive X dollars. They have overhead of Y (which includes wages for their employees). The remaining money is available to spend on medical treatments. But instead of doing that, they take another wedge of money out for profit.
The only possible way to look at that is the dollars that go to profit are taken from the dollars available for treatment. That’s why we have a stupid system.
If it’s an emergency, they’ll get treated.
You can sue anyone anywhere. Americans are not immune to foreign lawsuits, and vice versa. Whether you’ll win or not is another matter, of course.
With respect, I think it is you who is misunderstanding the nature of profit. It is not some worthless thing that is added on to a price by evil capitalists. Well, OK, it is sometimes :D. But in an ideal world, profit is the innovator’s cut of the savings to you, the buyer. Imagine that you could do something by yourself at a cost of 100 monetary units. Somebody comes up with a way of doing it for $50, using some innovation or efficiency. You pay them $10 for access to the innovation. That is their “evil” profit. But you are also better off, to the tune of $40. If they just gave you the innovation/efficiency for nothing, you would save $50. But they take a cut, $10, as a reward for their ingenuity. They’re not taking money out of your hands. They are charging a percentage for giving you a better/cheaper/more convenient way of doing things. And in the real world, the cut is usually much smaller than in this example.
[sorry, editing weirdness]
OK, first of all I apologise for the serial posting. Not entirely sure what is going on with my browser. Second, I went off on little economics rant there which missed Lobohan’s point about the distorted US healthcare market. Sorry.
My wife was treated for a broken collar bone free of charge after an accident in England. My daughter was treated free of charge (including surgery to insert a steel rod) in Belgium after she broke her femur.
From experience, if you are in Scotland, it is unlikely that you will get billed, based on the experience of a friend from the US. You may get hit with a £3 prescription charge as a flat fee for doctor prescribed drugs, but only if you get them from the chemist. If medicine is given to you at hospital then there will probably be no charge.
Bottom line is that it’s such a rare event compared with all the residents that the NHS will treat that we are better just letting you go. It would just mean loads of forms to fill in, and the NHS could do without more paperwork.