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I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone. Even though it may take a while for specialists. I even get benefits for going to free appointments at the dentist. Safes money and pain later, leading to more productiveness as well.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂). Being in a hospital, receiving anything I needed just by showing my insurance card (for which I didn’t have to pay anything either as I was without a job at that point). And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks I’m more than glad to pay that back.
The US just weirds me the fuck out. I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
What’s worse is that millions of people actually find the idea of paying a dime for anyone else’s healthcare disgusting. And we don’t even get to have a super low tax rate. We just spend our tax money on murdering children across the globe instead of caring for our own. Millions of us see it and oppose it but our society is just sick enough with enough asshole republicans gaming the system in a way that keeps us from doing a fucking thing about it. I wish we were as civilized as nations like Germany.
More than once, I hear an ad on the radio about good Christians coming together to help pay each other’s medical bills and think to myself that is the very thing they hate so much.
But they get to choose whose medical bills get paid. They can make sure that only “good Christians deserving of Jesus’ mercy” are the ones getting assistance. Not some stranger in the urban ghettos with children born out of wedlock, etc.
These are the people that will make the distinction between “drug addict” and “person with substance use disorder” based on demographics like race, socioeconomic status, and religion.
Uhhh no it’s not?
It’s literally a system where only Christians get benefits.
I’m also assuming one can be denied benefit if they were not a good enough Christian.
Some people consider the consent part of that arrangement to be key.
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And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks
By “complete dicks” you mean people like Friedrich Merz?
Fotzenfritz
Merz, Lindner, Söder… pick your poison. Anyone who wants to dismantle our solidarity systems instead of fixing (or even expanding) them.
We can only hope for our politicians to learn enough from the utter disaster in places like Britain to at least leave them be.
Even here, “cosmetic” dental work can be pricey. IIRC, my braces were covered by insurance, but the retainer wire after that had to be paid up front by my parents with some kind of “insurance will pay back 80% of it after ten years” clause. One has fully broken off and should have long been replaced, the other broke partially and should be replaced too, but I don’t really have the money to drop 600 on that right now if I don’t know how much I’ll get back.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂).
Congratulations, friend! 🎊
I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone.
Stimmt so aber nicht ganz. Die meisten Leute glauben bei uns wäre die Krankenversicherung verpflichtend, aber nicht jeder Staatsbürger ist krankenversichert.
Shit, das Problem habe ich tatsächlich übersehen. 🫣
Zumindestens ist das Problem auch als solches deklariert, da müsste definitiv nachgebessert werden. Ich würde jedoch behaupten das, im Vergleich zur USA, hier die Ausnahme die Regel bestätigt. Rein rechtlich hat hier jeder Krankenversicherungsschutz, es müssen “nur” diese Löcher gestopft werden durch die manche Menschen fallen.
I’m Italian and here public healthcare gets worse every day, thanks to continuous budget cuts and political incompetence. Nowadays if you want get blood tests in my region you have to wait months, or go through insurance, usually provided by… Your employer. Fuck them all.
I’m sorry to hear that… I expected something like this the moment the fascists won though. As far as I know you also lost social security (as in money for the jobless), right?
We probably have this in our future as well. Despite our government generally doing a good job (despite & except the neoliberal dick who once was our finance minister and just got fired) in this last legislature, far-right media propaganda is simply overwhelming. A christo-fascist outcome isn’t too unlikely next time. 😔 It will wreak havoc on everything.
Yeah no the fascists don’t have anything to do with this, or better, they’re just the last of a list of legislatures going back to the 90s who kept cutting the public services’ budgets, with a big upturn after the 2008 subprime crisis.
No we haven’t lost unemployment pay, they removed, for better or for worse, what the previous government instituted and labelled as “universal basic income”, which in the end took the form of a more generous unemployment pay, but we still have the standard one.
The truth is there’s actually very little difference between “left” and “right” governments nowadays: 10 years ago Renzi, with an allegedly left-wing government, actuated the biggest removal of workers right in recent history… They’re all rich kids anyway, all they care about is taking more and more money from the general populace.
I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
It’s because the US is far too big. People in one part of it have a very different culture to people in a different part of it, as a result they find it hard to empathize with them because their lives are so completely different. The problem is that they are all one country and operate under one government.
The individual state governments help a little bit (except when they’re trying to write laws to one-up each other), but basically the US government is trying to implement laws that will apply across wildly different cultural ideologies.
From the highly religious almost zealot south (Texas, Florida), to the mostly secular north east (Washington), to the liberal west (California), to the farming belt in the Central regions.
Even if I did go to a doctor, it might be because most insurance covers seeing a doctor but not dental shit.
Those are luxury bones!
It’s sad. They’re not just luxury bones in the US either. National healthcare here in Estonia only covers dental until you turn 19 and then all you get is a tiny annual benefit, rest is out of pocket. I believe that most countries don’t give adults dental coverage :/
Essentially the health board is completely fine paying for cancer treatments, broken bones, or to have a suspicious mole removed. They’ll subsidize prescription medication. But TEETH!!! WHO NEEDS THOSE???
It’s such a stumble of history that teeth were historically associated with barbers and not doctors, causing the dental practice industry to evolve separately from all other medical practices. Bullshit how a vestige of that lives on today in dental insurance coverage being its own special snowflake thing.
I HAVE dental insurance, NO ONE FUCKING ACCEPTS IT.
This is why dentists in the US decided to not make themselves part of the same system as other medical doctors-- The ADA vs AMA. They get to make their own rules and more importantly, deals to get paid.
And full cash money rules over whatever any insurance company decides to pay you.
Insurance companies designed their policies to maximize profit over patient care. Dentists said fuck that racket
Mine still submits to my insurance, I just have to pay on the day and I get a check in the mail later
Get a credit card
Use card to pay for getting your teeth done
Burn the card
Wait 7 years
Repeat till dead
What ?
You can declare bankruptcy every 7 years. I believe that’s what OP was referencing.
People at my new job talk about how great our dental benefits are. I found a dentist, scheduled a new patient exam (4 month wait). They told me I needed a cleaning and scheduled it for 3 months in the future. Two months after that, they stopped carrying my insurance.
I found another dentist, 6 month wait for an appt this time, was told I needed a cleaning, got a call the following week that they were no longer accepting my insurance.
I’ve discovered over the years that middle class people have absolutely no idea how most of the country lives.
Well, most people think they are middle class.
We are all working class
Yeah but some of that “working class” has a house, regular medical care, vacations, savings, etc.
That’s different than people living paycheck to paycheck, paying rent, praying, googling, and biohacking for their medical needs for lack of doctor access, never having been outside their own state or city, nor had the PTO to travel or relax in decades.
The best part is the entire food industry is geared towards selling as much sugar and carbs as possible to produce as much dental decay as possible and as quickly as possible.
I’m not murican so money isn’t the problem for me.
Its a crippling fear of doctors founded by a single dingle berries mistake over 10 years ago causing a year of problems and a skin transplant.Many countries outside America does not cover dentist in social public health services.
They like premium bones or something.
In my country we have public healthcare but not dentists. If you want teeth you have to pay.
, Care to share? So we can learn from your mistakes?
I don’t think its possible to do actually.
It was a mistake cause he removed a little thing from my skin that ended up causing me to be sick for a week cause he didn’t close it up properly, it than went on to come back twice as bad.
If I’d have to turn it into a lesson, maybe triple quadruple check online if your the doctor you plan on going to has zero negative complaints?Woof. So sorry.
I absolutely do not mean to diminish your pain or discount your experience, but every medical procedure comes with risks. Skin closures (sutures or otherwise) can be done correctly in the first place, but it is possible for the suture knot to come untied or for the suture material to break, and infection is the main risk for any procedure that breaks the skin.
To others reading this: the vast majority of physicians are competent professionals that always do the best that they can, but things can go wrong even if they do everything right. If a physician has one complaint against them for a poor outcome, that’s pretty normal. If there are no complaints at all whatsoever, they probably haven’t been in practice long enough for the statistics to catch up to them. If there’s a pile of complaints (especially ones that cite carelessness or callousness) that would be one to be wary of.
That’s Canada now… Has been for a while… I hurt myself 9 months ago. It took 5 months for an MRI, and I’m still waiting for the specialist. I’m partially paralyzed…
Sorry to hear that, I hope you get treatment soon. Isn’t it amazing how the world thinks our medical system is so great? There have been multiple deaths at the hospital near me of people waiting to see a doctor in emergency… not to mention people I know who would still be here today if the doctors in that same hospital were halfway competent, but since they can’t be sued for malpractice, nothing happens…
USians call your system great because we have the same experience and outcome you just described, but we pay thousands of dollars per month per person for it. From that perspective paying way less money for shit care is an objectively better system.
Not true. Last time I needed a scan, I got it in about a week.
It would be, but I pay through my nose in taxes for that system to be extra shitty. I’m not gonna sit here and say the US is better or worse because it’s subjective. If you make good money to pay for good insurance or have a good job and / or employer who gives good benefits, it is undoubtedly better, low wait times good service. But if you’re in the opposite group, which usually needs a good system more so than the better off people because of obvious dietary and time advantages they have to take better care of their health, than it’s a disaster of system, die in waiting rooms like we do. That’s all to say that we can pay for private insurance which compares to the prices in the states and pay a lot via taxes, which I can’t because I can’t afford both or “live” cough cough with a system that is just terrible. But to be clear, by no means is this a pissing contest, I feel your pain.
Thanks. The worst thing about Canada is that we’re right next to the us. If France was our neighbor, everyone would be upset, but because we’re in a horrible neighborhood, everyone just says ‘better than them’
You might be right, but I think it’s this way because most people don’t have any real idea how either system “works.” Haha, that’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. One system is set up to be dependent on good income for good insurance or good employer with benefits but has massive government wastage, which could easily fund a better medical system for lower income people. The other depends on taxes for the funding but has the same government wastage problems and massive incompetency in getting good people into the medical field.(ex: limiting number of doctors or nurses that can graduate)
I paid $2900 for my mom to get dentures.
I haven’t been to the dentist in probably ten years. Still follow the routine, but, yeah.
I protest the high prices of dental treatment by traveling abroad. It’s not only cheaper, but also a great opportunity to travel.
What does “coming to Canada soon” mean? Is there an impending change in the system? Or is it the certainty that public health can’t possibly work because the USA is the only major industrialized country that doesn’t want it?
The public health system here in Canada is very broken and the politicians have been pushing to move towards a more privatized system like the US. It’s only a question of time before we get the same problems. Here in quebec my wife has had to get a private doctor because she simply couldn’t see a doctor in the public system anymore.
Good luck with that. I have good insurance in the US and am having to schedule routine appointments 3 months in advance. During my last routine checkup I told my doctor there were several things I wanted to ask him about, and he said something to the effect that we only had 12 minutes but we’ll see how much we can get through. Wtf? I think the problem is that most doctors are corporate employees now. Similar to being public employees but with CEO bonuses and shareholder profits.
From what I’ve seen on here, there are some areas where the same bullshit brainrot has started taking hold
It has in the UK too, but that doesn’t mean it’ll go anywhere, or that there is a risk of the system changing. There’s always going to be angry shouty people who are being angry and annoying because they’re not getting what they want.
But they all insist on being as hard right and as fascist as possible, which works in the US with it’s broken system, but probably isn’t viable anywhere else.
I hope and want to believe you’re right. I don’t know enough to tell either way. I’m worried to see the right-wing brainrot spread over here in Germany too, but maybe I’m just alarmist.
It’s a sentence from the point of view of the person at the doctors (or of the original poster relating with that person) implying an imminent move to Canada.
Too bad the person doesn’t know dental isn’t covered in Canada.
I’ve been working nonprofit for a couple of decades but it hasn’t supported me well. I haven’t been to the dentist in 22 years. I’m thankful I don’t have any tooth pain. My wife is in the same boat. We had worked side jobs and hustled during COVID to put away some cash for it, saved up $19k. Only to need massive foundation/waterproofing work on our home. Now we’re broke, my job contract ends in less than a month. I was worried about my teeth, now I’m worried about my family being homeless.
progress
Never forget that real technological progress is being made, but an ever-growing percentage of your labor is stolen from you.
Ah! Capitalism
People with mild discomfort (e.g. a persistent cough) fill up most of the emergency rooms where I’m from, since the hospital is free. Unfortunately what this means is if you have a non life threatening problem, you have to wait in the same room as people with colds and flues that should be in bed waiting it out and eating soup.
to be fair, if you have a bad case of the flues you should be in the ER.
A bad case, yes.
Here in the states, people fill up the ER not because its free… its because they legally cant turn you away without looking at you first…
Meanwhile here is the U.S. I destroyed my ankle falling down a flight of stairs and I never had x-rays or any treatments and couldn’t afford to lose hours at work (where I made $8 / hour), so I bought a cane at Walmart and went to work on my foot. I had a permanent bursa as a result and I never found out what happened.
Years later when I finally had access to healthcare through insurance partially subsidized by my employer, I was getting another x-ray on the same ankle (because one injury makes future injuries more likely) they found out that tendons had ripped bone off during the original injury. :-(
I’ve been coughing for like 6 months now. Long covid, and I’ve been told it can last over a year.
That’s obviously not what I mean.
The UK’s dental care is also not really covered by the NHS beyond a few emergency procedures, and even when it is (assuming you can get onto an NHS dentist’s register) it costs a significant amount of money (70+ for checkup and dental work) once you turn 18, so I can imagine that most people just don’t bother.
I’ve already resigned myself to getting most of my teeth removed or replaced, as painful as that is, because I spent years without dentist cover thanks to COVID and generally refusing to spend the costs on checkups (as bad an idea that was)
I had dental treatment on the NHS and it was £20 or so charged as a flat fee (so irrespective of what the actual problem was/what needed doing), definitely not £70? If it’s gone up that much since then, that’s absolutely crazy.
EDIT: nvm, just looked it up, you get charged one of 3 ‘bands’ (lowest is £26.80 which is what I was charged, and the highest is £319.10). I never knew it was so pricey, as I ended up having to go private after moving anyway, since nobody was taking NHS patients…
I might need to consider private insurance at this point. What pisses me off is that corpo jobs will offer health insurance but NOT dental, even though most people can probably brave a GP waiting list but everyone has to pay out their arseholes for Dental.
The again, maybe I’m the minority with my fucked up teeth lmao. I’m just thankful my wisdom teeth grew in straight!
I’ve got to be like that after being almost killed by doctors in my first years. Unless it’s something urgent or cosmetic, I struggle to trust them. I feel like it’d be the same even if I move to a better country.
