I can’t go into much detail, but I know a lot of people with medical problems who aren’t being seen by doctors in the US. Time and again I see people who have what I know to be fairly routinely urgent medical concerns that do get told by the ER that they have to wait for a specialist… 6+ months out. I’m sorry, but an infection doesn’t wait 6+ months for you to put them on some basic antibiotics that a PA or I think even some nurse practitioners can prescribe in certain jurisdictions.
I remember when I was in the military (circa 2008), I had a colleague who told me his mother died on the sidewalk outside an ER because they couldn’t afford any insurance and the hospital refused to see her. I didn’t believe it, I though that it couldn’t possibly be a thing in the US. But I keep seeing parallel issues time and again, but now it’s for basic things and not because of insurance, but providers and networks are so fucked up that people must be dying from these things.
I know someone who worked in billing and claims for medical insurance too. They share horror stories about double leg amputees being denied a wheelchair…
Hope I don’t get an infected cut or something, even with my decent insurance who the hell knows at this point!
yeah, it’s crazy fucked. i have/have been on “good” US insurance plans for over a decade and my previous employer was also the hospital (a ranked university teaching hospital) and even being on the good insurance there, it takes several months to get an appointment after a referral for something that is generally regarded as serious/debilitating. the insurance and employer are always finding weird little ways to negotiate the insurance down and claiming to be cash strapped, but have constantly rotating fine art displays, a grand piano in the lobby with a professional musician during several of the working hours, and the finest recruitment displays, entire floors dedicated to billing/account specialists chasing payments, and god tier outsourced/fee based catering/food services. not to mention all the exec level people of this non-profit make absolutely unjustifiably huge salaries. also, no one could ever, ever tell you how much something was going to cost. it was always a mystery. i remember going through every hoop i could find to get prior authorization for oral surgery my in-network/in-house dentist said i needed. i spent days getting various offices to email things to each other and eventually the biller said the insurance company finally agreed to cover everything after my $75 outpatient surgical co-pay. what that means was, after i paid by $75 and got the surgery, months down the line i had to pay a bill for about $300. i called the surgery office and apparently that was a totally different fee that insurance never covers that nobody told me about. i complained to some friends and they all said that i got off easy and i must have really bothered them, because their “after action” bill was like $500-600 for the same surgery.
i bet if i hired a lawyer and sent threatening letters i could have gotten that taken off, but who the fuck has time, energy, and money for that? and what if the in-network provider/billing system decided to boot me because i engaged in legal action against them, then i’d really be fucked for everything else healthcare related.
i remember a friend of mine fucked his ankle up on the job and with this good insurance going through all the protocols, it took months to get his ankle imaged for a diagnosis. and THEN, the imagery was digitally sent to an outsource firm in south east asia (where M.D. labor is cheaper per hour) to get the diagnosis, which was then typed up and returned to the US where someone read it to him over the phone and scheduled treatment.
it would probably take 1000+ pages to identify all the ways in which any specific hospital in the US has been completely hollowed out from actually generating the value of public health and reoriented to the administrative bloat surrounding the pursuit of revenue streams.
And i hear time and again from dipshit boomers "oh no in Canada and the uk people have to WAIT to be SEEN :'( "
It’s not as ghoulish as the states, but I work in healthcare in Canada and our system is collapsing. We also can’t get specialists, no one can get a GP (literally no doctors in rural areas and years long waiting lists in cities), walk-ins shut after the first couple hours cause that’s all the patients they’re taking, emergency is full, ambulance and RAAPID are full, some hospital emergency rooms shut down on weekends and holidays cause there’s no nurses or doctors so good luck people of x community, we have so many people stuck in inpatient medicine or mental health cause we don’t discharge to street (good) but also don’t have any long term care or socialized hosuing with supports (bad) so people just stay at the hospital for years and years.
My hospital has a whole bunch of brand new radiation equipment for cancer- useless because we can’t get radoncs and why would we, who would go to school for that many years and then choose to be in my shithole community
But!! People aren’t denied most care because they can’t pay (some weird edge cases and then stuff like pharamcare isn’t socialized but whatever). That does make a huge difference. We also don’t have an entire medical insurance bureaucracy weighing us down or acting like so much drag on top of our issues.
No you don’t get it, if you have to wait either way then the only difference is in Canada I could be on a wait list. Here i just have no healthcare at all. Like oh no i’d have to wait in Canada? I’d have to wait here, but also here i can’t afford shit
It’s a question of scale. In the US, you wait months for insurance to figure your shit out, in Canada, you wait months to years because we literally just don’t have any fucking doctors because they all move to the US. The provinces don’t want to pony up to pay doctors and nurses half of what they can get in the US, and instead now they’re trying to privatize healthcare because it’s cheaper for the government.
Two years ago I slipped on the ice and shattered my right leg. This was in one of Canada’s biggest cities
It was almost eight hours before I was even seen at the hospital. After tests confirmed I had destroyed the ankle, I was very luckily placed for emergency surgery the next morning - at this point about 13-14 hours away
The hospital refused to let me stay anywhere. I was discharged and sent home to wait a handful of hours in immense pain before the surgery. When I say discharged however, I mean a nurse asked for my height, grabbed crutches that kinda fit (I learned later that the reason I struggled for two months with them was they were far too tall for me) and leaned them in a far corner out of reach then disappeared. I waited for almost 45 minutes before using my boot to hook the wheelchair nearby, drag it over, and drag myself to the crutches. The doctor’s suggestion, when I pointed out I had no easy way of getting home, was to take public transport
In February. On an icy day I’d already broken a leg, with an exposed right foot and crutches too tall to get around on. I’d been able to scare up a ride, but I’ve never felt so fucking shocked at the state of our healthcare before
yeah the situation in Canada is terrifying.
God I’m glad I have VA healthcare! They’ve gotten worse, but everything is in house and I can do a walk in for my primary care if I really need to!
I’m frankly shocked that there aren’t mass acts of terrorism on insurance company offices.
Americans have been trained to direct their ire downward.
which is why the young cannibalize themselves in school shootings
And I’d read it by god; you wouldn’t happen to have any recommendations, would you?
I don’t know about a book, but here’s a study.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/what-happens-when-private-equity-takes-over-hospital
Thank you for that, I appreciate it! Though not enough to remember I even asked for like 5 hours lol
Sometimes when I post obituaries of ghouls I’ll get replies in my inbox saying things like “Rot in hell, you piece of shit” and it takes me a moment to remember they’re not talking to me. (…or are they???)
It’s me, I’m the one doing that. I can stop if you want.
I wonder if a scientology grade mass legal DDOS of insurance companies would have any effect. I mean it defeated the IRS.