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.
The funny thing is that the US actually spends about twice as much on healthcare per capita as other developed countries. The reason that outcomes are so much worse there isn’t lack of money.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. Google says $13.493 per person in 2022. And in Germany it’s a bit more than $7.000…
Also things like maternal mortality are WAY worse…
I mean the USA is bigger and maybe things don’t translate exactly from a somewhat densely populated central european country to the vast emptiness of rural Wyoming. I guess an hospital is also something that is subject to economy of scale… But even most northern european countries where doctors come in with helicopters, don’t exceed the ~$7.000.
It is really off for the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita
(If that is correct, you could spend half the money on healthcare and also live 3 years longer, on average…)