Health Insurance that covers next to nothing but costs a fortune anyway.
☝️ recently got a covid test that based on all my research beforehand, it should have been covered except for $10 I would pay.
Jokes on me, it actually cost me $200 they charged to my credit card two weeks later. I didn’t even get to know the price at the time I needed medical care.
Sometimes other countries make fun of America for things they don’t understand. Not on this one, America deserves every bit of mocking it gets for it’s medical coverage atrocity.
You can get free rapid covid test kits from the US government with a valid mailing address.
A lateral flow test or something using a lab?
Must be a lab test as lateral flow is like £2:
https://www.boots.com/flowflex-antigen-rapid-test-lateral-flow-self-testing-kit-1-test-10312288
Or $7 in Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Flowflex-Covid-19-Antigen-Home-Test-1-Test/837992467?classType=VARIANT&athbdg=L1200
Nose swab into a piece of lab equipment about the size of a bread toaster. They put the swab into the thing right in front of me but I didn’t note any further details about the equipment.
I went in for strep testing (which is what it ended up being). They advised covid test too due to local outbreak, I predicted that they might so had done some prep research and thought I could expect a much lower bill.
Lesson learned, avoid getting tested for covid 😂
It’s a developing country. You will catch up.
Also we guys in western Europe are happy we are not ruled by Russia or China, and that’s because of the USA I think.
I kind of like the US culture, but it’s ridiculous how they treat human beings when money and power is on the line.
It’s a developing country. You will catch up.
It isn’t and we won’t. The US is a post-developed country backsliding.
I’m in the middle of trying to get a fairly expensive surgery.
If I had insurance, I would need to pay about $15,000 (between premiums, copays, annual deductible, coinsurance, and out of pocket maximums) with the only insurance available to me through my workplace before anything would be covered. So it’s not really worthwhile, right? Well, the surgery I need–around here–gets quotes of as much as $89,000. The most recent quote that I have is around $18,000. Keep in mind that the surgery takes about an hour, is a surgeon, one OR nurse assisting, and an anesthesiologist. The fee for the surgeon and nurse is about $5000, and the facility takes about $10,000. In the case of surgery in a hospital–rather than an ambulatory surgical center (ACS0—it’s even worse. With the same surgeon and OR nurse at an ACS, I had a quote of $16,300; at a hospital the quote was $49,000. The surgeon and nurse get the same fee regardless, which means that the hospital charged >$30,000.
…And good fucking luck getting a lot of places to give you prices at all, even though DHHS has mandated pricing transparency. Even if you know exactly what CPT billing codes are going to be used, it can be days of back and forth before you can get a price. If you need shit fixed NOW, you’re just going to be stuck with whatever they charge.
Recently?
How a lawyer in America got jailed for legally fighting against(and defeating) an American multi-national oil company that polluted the Amazon and more importantly harmed the lives and health of the locals with the pollution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtIAZMqrZE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
Donziger’s story is heartbreaking and infuriating, and I’m continually disappointed that so few people are familiar with his story and what the courts did to him. It’s one of the clearest examples of judicial corruption and the power and benefits that are afforded to corporations and almost never extended to the people fighting for what’s right and just.
Here in Sweden we currently have the problem that hospitals are understaffed and keeping wages of nurses so low that a lot of nurses quit and leave the others with an even crazier workload so the hospitals buy nurses semi permanently from temp agencies that cost multiple times more and the rental nurses have better pay and agreements of overtime and such. We had a well functioning health care but then the privatisation of everything and selling out communally owned services to private profit making schemes since the 90s. Because our government has been dominated by right wing market liberals and “sossehöger” - social democrats that jump on right wing populism to stay in power when they can rather than being consistent in left wing ideals.
Fucking end the market liberal experiment already. “The market solves all problems” - yeah, of it’s own interest which is how to squeeze out more profits regardless the how and how low it stoops.
It’s been the strategy of the right wing here since forever - get in power sell out as much they can (and for some unfathomable reason for discount prices), fuck things up in general, leave it to a left wing government to salvage what can be saved while blaming them for public service being garbage so they can motivate selling out more when they have power again. It’s a mix of blind idealists and profiteering scum that are in liaison with the right wing nationalist party with former nazi connections and obviously the Christian democrat leader that models the party according to the republicans is the most buddy-buddy with the fringe right.
And the populist right wing of course romanticises about the good days when everyone had housing and was safe and provided and so on - that was built solely by the left and the right wing fought them every step of the way and that they have since then torn down. Blatant lies and disinformation all the way.
But it is what people vote for. We get the societal break down we deserve.
Whoa, I thought that just Australia was following American economics. The descent into privatisation on everything. I guess there are greedy and ignorant people everywhere. For some reason knowing Sweden is also going down the neoliberal toilet it makes me feel better and I dont know why. I guess its a feeling of inevitability.
Reminds me of John Stewart stating that to combat vested interest takes energy and effort every single day.
There are so many groups taking advantage of our overworked lives combined with the over abundance of useless information that distracts us from the real issues that impacts us. Its very difficult to know how and where to direct our energy. Of course thats my view as a social/environmental person. However, if you love the conservative/neoliberal view of the world. Then congratulations, things must seem pretty great right now.
EVERY instance of ‘public-private’ healthcare goes that route, touted as the wave of the future and a seamless melding of public interest and delicious capitalist pork, and then every single one of them gets drunk on the cash and goes toxic like this.
It’s happening to Canada too. And France. And London.
Microloans, also called microfinances. Very popular in developing countries in South Asia, and also the same thing that is responsible for the suicide epidemic of farmers in India. With high interest rates and fixed time-period constraints, they’re the most cruel and fucked up things to ever exist, they’re worse than indentured serfdom.
Sounds like ‘pay day loans’ in the US.
Back in the day, a loan shark was a criminal who charged an outrageous 20% interest for money. Working class folks were at the mercy of these “six-for-fivers.”
Ronald Reagan became President and now established banks could charge 35% or more.
I’d like to add that there are good versions of “microloans”! I learned that there used to be (or still are, didn’t check) non-profit " banks" in some parts of India (and South africa I think) that would give out small loans of a few dollars to a few hundred dollars (which can be quite a lot of money in India). There was no collateral and low interest, but a group of people had to apply for a loan together. Until the first loan was paid back, the rest of the group couldn’t apply again. It was meant to provide financial backing and capital to microbusinesses (e.g. fishers, farmers, peddlers) that would otherwise be excluded from the financial market due to a lack of collateral and otherwise be forced to take high-interest loans.
SHGs (which is what you’re talking about, also called SBLP in some places) are not a majority, their lenders/borrowers are often people within the same marginalized group, and it is very slow, so people tend to avoid them. MFIs dominate the microloan industry, and they’re very exploitative.
I cannot find the exact quote but it was something like “If you don’t grow, you’re dying”. This is the source of all enshittification. Companies are being forced by VCs to increase revenue every year to meet unreasonable revenue goals just to satisfy a handful of investors.
