(EU person) From my reading, the cost is just the start. Others are: insurance companies rejecting claims for stupid reasons; providers overdoing treatments to maximize their bills; the stress involved navigating all this hostile system etc.
The cost thing has just always been the part of online discourse that sticks out to me, because it’s clear under current laws that it shouldn’t be the financial apocalypse people paint it as, unless they have 0 insurance.
When my wife walked into ER, she was just a little worried about a heavy period. Turns out it was a “time of life thing, stuff go crazy” but they also noticed her Sodium was low when they drew blood and admitted her.
ER being what it is, beds are at a premium, and they want to “turn beds” if they can, just like a restaurant wants to turn tables. They’re both run as a business. They tried to speed up my wife’s care and gave her too much Sodium too quickly (actually about 2x the rate recommended). She went into a coma.
They tried a bunch of things to bring her back. I’ll always remember the doctor saying “I don’t think she’ll die” is an almost bored, disinterested tone as she lay there. She wasn’t responding so they moved her to share a room where a woman was undergoing assisted suicide while they waited for her to revive. ER beds are at a premium, remember. They’re can charge a lot for those, so she was taking up valuable space.
She did eventually surface, but it’s not like the movies. You don’t just “wake up” and everything starts to get better. Things were so bad your brain shut down, that has consequences. She is awake, but she is not the same person, she’s terrified of, well, everything. There were months of neuropathic pain all over her body. Pain that wouldn’t go away with either OTC painkillers or anything else they tried, all the way up to opioids. Have you ever heard someone lose their voice from screaming so much ? She was still screaming in agony, but she wasn’t making a sound.
She has been in and out of mental health asylums over the last two years while we struggled to try and fix things. It hasn’t worked. I’ve had to give up my job to care for her, a job I loved, working at Apple these last 20 years. We leave the country, permanently, on 4th July, because we can’t live in San Jose without an income, we don’t have anyone else to help, and I can retire in the UK with my family around to help out on the days we need it. I’ve only really been waiting until the kid finished the year at school.
Doctors everywhere make mistakes. Not everywhere has a money/profit motive to drive treatment though, that’s pretty much only in the USA. I had excellent health insurance which covered our family but that makes no difference when the hospital just see you as a figure on a balance sheet.
Granny Weatherwax (created by a Brit, of course) had the right of it. The root of all evil is treating people as things. People as things, that’s it. In our experience, the US “healthcare” system does not treat people as humans, they’re just figures on a balance sheet.
It’s too late for it to get much better for my wife, and hell, the stress and pressure of the last 2 years has taken its toll on me too, apparently prolonged stress and the body’s reaction to it can provoke type-1 LADA diabetes, so now I’m fucked too. Not as badly as my wife, with a pump connected to me, I can live an almost normal life, but still.
The benefit of the UK’s system is that it’s based on patient care, not a balance sheet. Like I said, I’ve had long experience of both, and this idea that you “wait months” is not how it really works in the UK, in fact we have waited longer to see specialists in the USA (again, with gold-plated insurance) than I’ve ever waited in the UK. It doesn’t matter how much money you have (presumably bar Musk-like money) if the expert you need isn’t available…
The UK will prioritise people in need (my mother has recovered from two different cancers with very timely treatment, my uncle was in open-heart surgery the next day after his yearly physical,…) but will “slot you in” if there’s no medical emergency. It’s not perfect, and it’s now recovering from a decade or so of underfunding as the Tories tried to sell it off bit by bit, but I do not believe my wife would have experienced the same treatment as she did in the US - there just isn’t the same approach to medicine.
My advice: never go to O’Connor hospital in San Jose. They might just fuck up your life completely, so they can make more money.