One of the most disturbing aspects of the US model is how mechanically efficient it is at extracting money. A couple years back, I drove my wife to the ER very early morning because she thought she was having a drug reaction (she wasn't, thankfully). After a brief moment of her checking in and explaining condition to the medical person that was vetting(?) incoming patients, we went to a little ER room. The part of it that has stuck with me since and will for the rest of my life is the nurse who got our health insurance info came around to our room before a fucking doctor did.
You had to give your health insurance info to get a Covid shot, despite the fact that it's completely free via the federal government. Complete joke.
That’s gonna be an expensive bill for your hand surgery when you’re making 5 cents an hour in prison
Remember an attack on dr. Fauci is an attack on science itself
every single person involved in this decision deserves a nice evening in central park
when i was in uni i went to emergency cos i had sharp stabbing pains in the heart area, they ended up admitting me overnight
turns out it was just some sort of painful cramps in the pec muscles over the heart cos i was drinking metric shittonnes of coffee lol but i walked out without paying a cent cos australia isnt quite that fucked just yet, but i cant imagine having to make the decision "can i afford to get these stabbing heart pains checked out"
What can we do about it? Realistically, what is the way out of this? Every day I feel more and more like a farm animal, a source of blood for these vampires to drink. The vast majority of everyone I know personally and meet online passionately rejects this, and yet this glaring issue not only persists, but seems to be getting worse and worse. I’m not even trying to sound like a doomer - what the fuck are people supposed to do in this situation?
Hit them with another cryptolocker attack or five until they're no longer the biggest insurer
We need to seize hospitals at this point. Mass strikes of people refusing to pay their insurance bills.
If you could convince nurses that nationalization would mean less time dealing with then billing computers, you could get single-payer in about a week. It's the biggest headache they deal with by far, and it actively impedes their ability to actually care for patients (the reason they like being nurses in the first place!)
I used to believe this but after working with nurses for a decade I have some bad news. They are all named Karen, married to cops and love the taste of boot.
Remember that one hateful elementary school teacher you had, seemed like they went into teaching just so they could have absolute power over the helpless? This demographic is highly over represented in nursing.
I used to believe this but after working with nurses for a decade I have some bad news. They are all named Karen, married to cops and love the taste of boot.
Anecdote. I have a lot of family and friends who are nurses and regardless of any flaws, all white, and they definitely aren't Karens. Some of them are pretty strongly anti-cop (going back years/decades).
Self selection bias. I've worked with hundreds, across dozens of states. Not friends and family.
Polls consistently show standard pink collar, patriarchial, liberal voting patterns with the majority of support for increased healthcare coverage, the one exception, coming from young nurses, who typically leave nursing entirely in the first two years of practice because it's such a fucked up self hating profession.
Absolutely. I come from a family of doctors and they complain about these archaic Byzantine systems almost as much as difficult patients or the strain of the job.
I’d be worried that seizing a hospital would disrupt care for people who really need it , but I think people refusing to pay their insurance bills is an excellent idea that could really catch on. How do you think people could organize a strike like that? Might be a topic for a separate thread.
Stop using the healthcare system. I know that's not an option for a lot of people, but as a fairly healthy young person with means to stay healthy, I'd rather be dead at 30 than go anywhere near a health"care" facility and potentially ruin everything I've made in life. They want to treat this like a perfectly elastic market, fuck 'em. They're not gonna exploit me for my labor then scare me into submission into giving it back via dumb quacks.
That’s definitely the conundrum - ordinarily the answer would be to stage a boycott but this is a service that is literally life or death for so many and boycotting isn’t an option for them. I had to get stitches this week and wound up paying $250 out of pocket because my health insurance couldn’t get my info fast enough. They eventually compensated me a few days later but what if I just didn’t have $250 at that moment and had to wait for my ins company to get their shit together? I could have been at serious risk of losing the finger I wounded if it became infected, or worse.
I don’t think this is new? My insurance initially denied my husbands ER visit when he had a back spasm and couldn’t stand or walk in the middle of the night.
We got them to cover it on appeal, but it seemed like this was pretty common when I googled it.
Also cool is that they would only pay for ambulances that were in network, which don’t exist.
Insurance employees: We're doing a job we have to make a living somehow!
Hexbear: Compelling, please face the wall now.
have you ever seen a health industry person blow the whistle?
I don't remember what it was like to not feel hatred for these monsters
