You talk as if haggling over prices during a medical emergency was normal and are proud you got a good deal.
That's what normalization of deviance looks like.
That's what normalization of deviance looks like.
I have received multiple offers to work in the US as a dev but the quality of life and safety nets here in Canada are more important to me than a higher salary.
He only asked how much it's going to be and was charged with over double what he was quoted.
In the U.S. it’s possible (but not widely known) that you can shop around for medical imaging like MRIs. (My wife has saved thousands of dollars doing this.) Hospitals often run these as profit centers so the markup is quite steep.
Universal healthcare is great, but when you're in a 2-party system and one party undermines it whenever they're in power, the result is terrible.
For what it's worth, I live in the UK which has similar woes to how you describe Canada's two-party system. However we do normally get seen quickly for things which are a threat to life---but elective operations can take much longer. Mental health issues are also dealt with sluggishly at best.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7292524/
2. https://www.hqontario.ca/System-Performance/Wait-Times-for-D...
For reference, i got an MRI in two days for knee pain after i fell with a bike and the pain didn't go away after a few weeks ( so obviously nothing urgent).
And FYI, i paid for it, iirc 60-100 euros, repaid in full by my medical insurance.
They were saying they had pain and nausea, the doctor suspected a kidney stone. Is this an "emergency"? I have had a kidney stone, it is intense pain. My mother had one, said it reminded her of childbirth.
But it won't kill you, probably. You could just be in intense pain for weeks or longer waiting to pass it.
Is that an emergency? I think in probably any sane medical system it is. In the USA? No idea.
you may struggle/it may take long to find certain things to get a diagnosis, but once you do, it's a ball that gets rolling insanely fast.
2 anecdotal examples:
colleague's young child was fainting, took them quite a while to get through the right set of doctors/specialists to find out it was a brain tumor - after that was found though, they were scheduled for surgery the next morning. Operation successful, child okay.
I had an appendectomy in the middle of covid: went to the ER unannounced at 7 p.m. - was on the table at 1 a.m. - i paid 50 euros (10 for each day i spent there (they kept me for 3-4 days "just in case")). This was quoted to me up front (the rate, but not the number of days) and i signed a document stating i understood that charge before i was in surgery.
For non-urgent appointments, yes, the wait time for specialists can sometimes be months.
Why is an MRI anywhere in the world $1500, or $3500 for that matter?
Private hospitals in London largely live off a split of offering cheap convenience or extracting money from foreign patients, but there are so many of them fighting for a small pool of patients given most people just go to the NHS that they have to compete hard.
Fuck, a few years ago I had to switch dentists and I couldn't get even a teeth cleaning without waiting more than six months.
I don't know what the prices are in Germany, but in London an abdominal MRI is in the $280-$600 range. (EDIT: And you can usually get a same or next day appointment)
The US are a clear outlier.
Makes the US pricing in this article even more bizarre - in "normal times" you could literally fly to Europe for an MRI and save money.
That it is worth it that people go bankrupt due to medical issues because it means that certain professions can earn 6 figures?
I’m really curious. What do you think you are saying? How do you think those two statements correspond? Do you genuinely believe that if the majority of Europe were to ditch its public health services that salaries would go up and that that would be a good thing?
FWIW, I am a US person, resident in Germany.
Neither of those things, no. (Also, if you think of €100k as "a huge salary", you should recalibrate; in the industrialized world it is not.)
> I am still not sure what you are trying to say. But the fact that you LEFT the US that has that kind of dynamic for Germany, where income inequality is smaller and many things -- including medicine -- are more widely accessible makes me scratch my head.
The healthcare in Germany appears to be somewhat crap compared to the highest level of care available in the US. It's an order of magnitude cheaper, though.
I left the US because the US is a police state, not because best-in-the-world healthcare has highest-in-the-world prices.
My comment could best be summarized as "health care costs should not be a major concern in your life as a SWE because they will be cheap (to you) everywhere, so make your SWE life choices based on other things". You can inaccurately paraphrase this as a rejection of concern for social justice, income inequality, or a generalized "fuck you, got mine" at your own peril.
(FWIW, I think national boundaries are mostly irrelevant and unimportant, and drawing the boundary of your official-concern-for-the-wellbeing-of-others at an invisible line checkpoint to be somewhat closeminded. There are billions without meaningful modern healthcare access at all (or even clean water) so the selfrighteous indignation bit about the relative quality and expense of healthcare in two major industrialized western nations is sort of a silly nit to pick.)