| > heqlthcare is breaking under the load. I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system. And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone. Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think? Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies. Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare. It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price. |