Patricia AasI knew American healthcare was abysmal, but I was still shocked when I learned a few years ago that Americans pay for ambulance rides and giving birth.
I know I should’ve realized.
It just wasn’t in my realm of possibilities.
I went to school in the US from 95-97 and while I was there I volunteered at an “AIDS hospice”. And the premise seemed to be that it was a place where folks went to die.
Now remember I was a kid and Norwegian and clueless.
Years later someone said that I was lying when I told them this. Because why would someone be dying of AIDS in 96? There had been drugs for years by then.
So as an adult I realized that the people I had been caring for when I was a teenager were probably people who were dying of a treatable disease because they didn’t have healthcare.
And the depth of propaganda Americans live under astounds me because if you ask people on the street about if they should have universal healthcare a good bunch still say no.
That is a level of Stockholm syndrome the Swedes would have zero tolerance for.
Apiary@Patricia they are told from a very young age that they live in the best country in the world. Why would they want something lesser countries have? (It’s frustrating)
@Patricia sadly it’s propaganda that bleeds over to Canada where people are trying to undercut the public healthcare system.
ModestinoSycamore@Apiary it’s quite shocking to witness even today how deeply it is ingrained
@Patricia yep. It was a culture shock moving here.
Jack Daniel (often offline)@Apiary @Patricia I remember conversations about healthcare, and many other topics when I spent a couple of weeks in Norway in 2017. Most Norwegians were skeptical, and when convinced they were appalled. "It's like you are trying to kill anyone who isn't wealthy".
No, it is not "like" that, it is that.
No, it is not "like" that, it is that.
@jack_daniel @Apiary I know it’s true, but my brain just can’t accept it
mav 
stilescrisis@Patricia This is probably because America does have free health care, if you are in the military, but it's kind of abysmal. Long waits, lots of things denied, etc.
The Doctor@Patricia Some of it is propaganda. Some of it is "This means some people I personally don't like will die."
@Patricia People protested Ryan White at school and at home when he was alive.
David J. Atkinson@Patricia I wonder about the response the question were phrased as, “What would you think if your medical care was free?” The abstract nature of the question must certainly throw people off.
#healthcare
#healthcare
🐈⬛David Sommerseth@meltedcheese @Patricia The response I've gotten to that approach has more commonly been like "But you know, it's not free. Nothing is truly free and you pay higher taxes instead. I prefer lower taxes so I can freely choose the health insurance provider best fitting my and my family's need."
I've tried a similar response too ... where it derailed completely pretty quickly.
"So your solution with progressive taxation doesn't solve much. Then the rich people will just sponsor lazy people not willing to work, who will just abuse the system to get more in return than they contribute. This approach just enables socialistic based corruption, so the state need to spend even more money on countermeasures. Which leads to more state based surveillance. That's why Republicans are fighting for full freedom without the government controlling us."
This is paraphrased from a discussion I had many years ago. At this point, I just gave up.
These folks are brainwashed from their childhood that USA is the best democracy in the world, where anyone can become what they want if they work hard for it and that socialism is communism in disguise. But they just fail to see their wonderland country is slowly collapsing at their own doorsteps.
Nonya Bidniss 🥥🌴@Patricia Capitalism in America = multi-systemic brutality. Pick your societal system. In America, if there's money to be made within it, people are needlessly suffering and dying while CEOs get bigger bonuses because of it. Because of the suffering and dying. I guess it would be hip to say "sit with that"...
@Nonya_Bidniss the amount of suffering is heartbreaking
I heard some people refer to the system in USA to be corporatism. It's the big influential companies essentially setting the political course, through their donations to the Democratic Party or GOP. And these parties "pay back" through politics benefiting the companies first of all, then the party and at the very end, the people.
Anders Stenberg@Patricia I honestly thought it didn't become properly "controllable" until quite a lot later. According to Wikipedia there was a breakpoint at that time though, with some new treatment coming in 1995 and "Within two years, death rates due to AIDS will have plummeted in the developed world."
Don't doubt it though.
Jan Lehnardt 
@Patricia ooooooooooofffff :(((((
cranky hedgehog 🦔 🏳️🌈@Patricia yeah even with ok health insurance both are still excitingly expensive.
@dhedgehog that blows my mind
Alun Jones@Patricia surviving cancer nearly bankrupted me, and was one of the driving factors behind the slow death of my WFTPD business.
@ftp_alun that is heartbreaking 💜💜💜
Morten@Patricia The American dream is making money, not living long and prospering. They phrase it as "anyone can make it in America" but let's be honest: everyone thinks that the *anyone* is them.
peter sibley@Patricia i’ve known multiple people who’ve lied about their names in an emergency room at a hospital in the US due to fears of crippling bills.
@petersibley that sounds like civil disobedience to me
fluke@Patricia I live on the arse end of the world (nz) and I’m constantly shocked at how shitty the USA is at almost everything
Noah Cook@Patricia Without getting into specifics, yes American healthcare can be that bad, and worse. In fact, the problems are often fractal: the closer you look at a problem, the more the many difficulties seem to multiply, until it's one step forward and two back.
But I also want to add that I wish that the root causes were as simple as greed or corporate profits. I wish it were just a matter of implementing a few easy reforms. And it's like repairing a ship under sail, it can't just stop.
@UncivilServant you must be new here because that is exactly what I want to hear 😂 I want to hear about realistic transitions to better systems that doesn’t result in suffering while we do it. But as fast as is possible to do safely 😃
Cassandrich@Patricia The degree to which that is true really depends on how awful your particular locality and medical providers are (which in turn is strongly correlated with race & class stratification). In at least some cases, you can ignore the bills for around 3 years until they stop trying. But yes it's awful.
Ingar Smedstad@Patricia It is a sobering backdrop to the eroding healthcare system we have in Norway.
Privatization and company health insurance is slowly eating away at the public healthcare capacity and we already have a system consisting of those who have access to private clinics and those who do not.
It is frustrating.
Kingsley Bugarin PLY OAM 🇦🇺Sounds like what has been happening in Australia and the UK for decades.
In Australia the far-right conservative scum have been slowly chipping away at medicare each time they are in power. Adding more private insurance incentives and reducing pubic funding to medicare each time.
Then when Labor, our "left workers party" that turned neo-liberal pro-capitalist after the CIA coup in 1975, gets elected they don't wind back the damage so it only goes one way.
Medicare is still effective and functional but a few more conservative governments and it probably won't be.
This seems to be a wide spread phenomenon.
Pat@ingsme This seems to be the case in Germany, too; I intend to avoid private as a matter of principle because as an American I know where it can lead.
@Patricia The treatments available in 96 were not as good as the ones today. People still died. Especially if they tried to hide their illness.
@Apiary looking back, I was so naive at the time, today I would’ve asked so many questions, back then I just accepted it as “I guess this is how it has to be”