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As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.
You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.
I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.
Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.
My experience has been: if you have an immediate health issue with an obvious solution, you can get pretty good care. Say if you have a broken arm, gun shot wound, heart attack, stroke, etc. Anything uncommon, or that requires ongoing care, is a life sucking nightmare.
I'll give some examples from my own life. I live outside a major metropolitan area. A relative was visiting me and had a stroke in my living room. I called 911, and an ambulance appeared 5 minutes later, in 25 minutes they were in a hospital with a telemedicine link to a stroke expert. The expert said they needed to be brought to a downtown hospital so they were sent there by helicopter. One of the two best neurosurgeons in the city performed an endoscopic removal of the clot and saved their life.
Contrast this with a different relation who struggles with chronic pain and spine problems and has spent the last 20 years bouncing around various doctors, battling insurance companies, pharmacies, waiting to be seen, waiting endlessly for specialists, tests, and having to keep track of all of their information themselves because the system is fragmented and every office wants a complete restatement to their medical history.
> New study links hospital privatisation to worse patient care
> 29 Feb 2024
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-02-29-new-study-links-hospita...
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
I've only heard it said that "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", not capitalism and economics: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
Got any evidence for that?
Forbes, 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/yuwahedrickwong/2019/04/19/econ...
NPR, 2009: https://www.npr.org/2009/10/26/114163098/a-spoonful-of-socia...
LSE Economics Society essay question, 2018: https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/lse-economics-society...
I also clicked through ten pages of Google search results for "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others", each of which showed the literal quotes in the preview excerpts, at which point I became too bored to continue.
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.
> how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar
I agree completely, but it's not Kafkaesque for a person to ask one's own community for voluntarily contributions in their time of need, just because that community happens to be online.
> gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have [strong] online social networks
There's nothing Kafkaesque about a popular person having more opportunities than an unpopular person. And there's nothing inherently capitalist about it either. This is human nature, nothing more. I would be far more concerned about an economic system that sought to "guarantee equality" in a way that reduces the individual's incentive to be kind to others.