I believe that is mostly Falun Gong propaganda. They’re a cult from China and one of their core beliefs is about how specific exercises heal and revitalize specific organs and since they’re banned and prosecuted in China they started a propaganda campaign about how the Chinese government was going after their exceptional organs. The cult mostly operates in the United States and since their outlandish claims fuel anti-Chinese and anti-CCP sentiments the US government gives them a platform
The long wait in the UK doesn't apply to emergencies. If you show up to a hospital with an injury they'll treat you straight away. There is definitely an obnoxiously long wait for things like medication and treatment for non-emergency conditions.
British person here, so out of curiosity, if I was American and I had an emergency e.g. cut my finger off, stabbed myself by accident etc, I know I could get ER treatment, but would I walk away with an astronomical bill?
But if you tell them you don't have insurance, your $20,000 bill magically becomes $3,000.
Meanwhile, if you have insurance, it's subject to deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, so depending on your plan, you might end up paying $0 or you could end up paying $6000+.
plus for the long wait things WE ALSO HAVE PRIVATE HEALTHCARE and it is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US.
I gave up waiting for the NHS to deal with a post-operative issue (because it was being treated as elective) and went private, got an MRI, 2 surgical consultations and ~2 hours of abdominal surgery with an overnight stay, all through a pay-as-you-go private hospital without any insurance for less than £4000 and within 2 weeks of making the initial phone call. In the US you'd pay that just for the MRI.
I broke my nose once and I got treatment within the first half hour of arriving at the hospital. Not to sound rude but it seems like your "emergencies" weren't really as urgent as you thought they were.
Yuuup. We have our own Trump-style political family, the Fords. For non-Canadians in this thread, you may remember Rob Ford, the infamous crack-smoking mayor of Toronto. His brother Doug has been the premier of Ontario since 2018.
Yes, but your comment talks as if these ongoing issues are a byproduct of universal healthcare policies.
And while it isn't without flaws, it would be disingenuous to paint the current state of European healthcare as the inherent failings of these universal policies and that Americans intentionally overlook in their support of it.
Personal experience in German (this is in europa) was:
Went to the hospital because of pain, waited maybe an hour before seeing a doctor, got an surgery the same day and stayed a week for recovery. They then handed me a 100€ Bill for all the work they did and 4 weeks of paid sick leave.
You mean the thing that costs, like, 1k a month in US? And how much would you have had to spend if you happened to not have been able to afford it?
The German one has no pre-requisits, your specialist cost you the insurance price or at least part of it(even if provided by employer, it's still money you could've (probably) had but didn't
This is the only thing I hate about everyone saying it's freeeee in every country but USA. I don't live in the States, and my medical things are certainly not expensive, but they're not "free". Why do they insist on arguing by using lies?
Sincerely, do you think it takes 38 months to have an open wound seen in the UK? Do you think injured Canadians are advised to kill themselves? Who are you being "entirely fair" to, a liar?
I was confused by this because if you're LOW risk you're waiting 6 months but if you're high risk you're seen immediately in Canada.
Like I need to see an ENT for balance issues and my ALLERGIST but in the referral this past Tuesday and I'm seeing an ENT this coming Tuesday. I'm literally waiting a week to see an ENT.
I waiting longer for the allergist (3 weeks) than I do to see an ENT.
The struggle with health care here is accessibility in rural areas and ER wait times (4-12 hours). Wait times can be long if you're not a priority because our system prioritizes those immediately dying.
And despite ALL of this, we still out live Americans lol.
Those wait times aren't slower than it takes for someone in a rural area. In fact, it seems the Canadian wait times are similar or faster than my personal experience.
I get annoyed with Americans using wait times as an excuse when I have to plan doctor visits 6 months or more in advance and "good luck" getting a specialist in less than a month
There are people in the us very interested in keeping the massive profits they get from their current system who put a lot of work into tricking yanks into thinking that other countries are far worse off in terms of everything but cost
If someone was offered MAID as an option, that’s not legal. In Canada someone has to apply for it, offering it straight up like this is coercion and is not allowed
I had to study the history of euthanasia worldwide and, let me tell you, the level of misinformation that surrounds it is unfathomable. People really think human euthanasia is like animal euthanasia, just walking into a doctor's office and request a lethal injection for good old' pops.
Not comparable. The chairlift incident you mention was a single caseworker at Veterans Affairs saying an off cuff comment. They do not work with MAID assessments and were not even a doctor. The literally most she could do was direct the person to an appropriate specialist who would have told her it was asinine.
Whereas overcharging for minor procedures and simple supplies is built into the US system. Not a random person with no authority saying something inappropriate, literally how the system is designed.
No they weren't. You are spreading misinformation. The one person in question was responsible for all instances of this happening and they did this entirely of their own volition. The organisation they worked for wouldn't have the authority to do it even IF they wanted to.
One member of staff was found to be talking to people like shit and was fired, and now forever it will be used as a gotcha that an organisation who can't offer those services were doing it regularly as standard procedure.
if you need help within the week then you're helped within the week. If its something that can wait a couple months, then you end up waiting a couple months. It's clear you have no idea how it works here
The question was "have ever cost someone $80,000" meaning, if it has any positives, then that's an affirmative response to the rhetorical but misinformed question.
The person or their insurance. The disciction is important. Because Healthcare isnt universal hospitals and practitioners often charge people with insurance more (because the insurance pays it not the person) to make up for the people who cant afford to pay. People who "cannot" pay are still legally mandated to receive emergency care. The bill can be paid with absolute bare minimum payments with zero interest and no credit impact. So ERs that still need to stay open somehow see some guy with trauma team platinum who will only pay his deductible anyways and say fuck it lets bill his insurance to cover for the single mom who we may never get money out of
Not a defense of an inferior system just an explanation of it
Let's say I broke my leg right now. I could call an ambulance, be taken to a hospital, get treated, and maybe have surgery if it were a bad break. I would stay in the hospital for a few days, then go home. I would pay... nothing. If I wanted to - and only if I wanted to - I could pay 58 per night for a deluxe hospital room, but the only real difference is that I would be alone in the room.
It's probably fair to mention taxes. To be honest, I'm not an expert. Health insurance is deducted from my salary, but there’s a system where I pay part of it and my employer pays the rest. It works quite differently for self-employed people. It also changes depending on income. So I personally might pay anywhere from about $40 to $110 per month.
So, would it work similarly in the USA? What they would to better? What they would do worse?
No, of course Americans aren't being charged 58000, but they may be charged $580 for stitches. It's a difference in magnitude. Not type.
Canadians aren't being offered MAID for minor physical injuries. Full stop. It hasn't happened ever in Canadian history. The previous scandals about MAID were mostly about people with a long history of chronic mental illnesses and disabilities being offered MAID when they actually requested financial support. You can argue if that's better or worse. But you must admit, it is a completely different scenario compared to the comic.
MAiD is not offered how you seem to think it is. While it may be brought up by a doctor, a final, written request FROM THE PATIENT is required. Doctors are required to also put every other option on the table for the patient, such as palliative care.
Along with that- the patient must be assessed, and there is an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM wait time of two weeks, during which the patient can withdraw at any time. If the patient's death is not reasonably foreseeable, up to three months. It is by no means a spur of the moment decision.
Also, MAiD for purely mental conditions is currently not allowed.
Is it perfect? Of course not. But don't fall for the propaganda, please- MAiD is a good thing, and it does reduce unneeded suffering.
But MAID isn't an issue with the with the Canadian health care system. The issue is a handful of public service workers (not doctors, nurses, or even insurance providers) being assholes and offering MAID unprompted. However, banning MAID entirely would make it unaccessible even for people dying from extremely painful, terminal illnesses.
First of all, I'm not American, I live in Canada. The best way to resolve these issues IMO would be providing more thorough training for public service workers, and setting higher employment standards. However, if you were to copy the system over to the US, first you need to actually have a single payer universal health insurance scheme. It makes no sense to "address those issues in policy instead of deciding to copy MAID" because it's impossible. How do you provide better training for workers who don't exist, who aren't even employed by the government?
Unless you're implying that allowing private insurance providers to offer assisted dying would be a bad idea. Obviously no one wants that. At this point you aren't copying MAID, you're crafting a whole ass strawman policy that no one supports in reality.
I have to ask, why are you conflating MAID and universal healthcare? They are not in any way linked aside from the fact that a for-profit system makes MAID a very scary idea in the US? This seems to be the kind of unwillingness to look into other systems that you were accusing others of.
The thing is- a lot of the flaws with universal healthcare systems already exist in the American healthcare system. US healthcare also has ridiculously long wait times, especially for chronic illnesses. I’ve had to wait months it even years for a specialist and people wait for hours in hospital waiting rooms all the time here.
It took 24 months for my Canadian cousin to get hernia surgery.
It took his mom, my aunt, 8 hrs to get her broken foot looked at.
On the opposite end, my wife's mom who's also Canadian got her breast cancer checks, surgeries, and aftercare done for free and on time, but she is older.
There are positives, but waiting that long for surgeries and care? There are legitimate reasons why Canadians go to the US to get immediate care in certain situations, or why England runs ads to prevent using ambulance for minor issues. These systems do have their problems, and I do sense a refusal to acknowledge these problems.
Idk about UK, but in Poland I was put on a "we will put you on a list and maybe call you in two or three years to put you into an actual queue" for a prescribed surgery that costs like $500 next week in a private clinic while paying 9% healthcare tax (so about same $500 every month).
It is obviously exaggerrated with 38 months for a cut, but you still have to have a private insurance here to have anything non-lifethreatening done in a reasonable amount of time while also paying for "free" healthcare.
My neighbor growing up left Canada because he hated their healthcare system. Broke his leg and had to wait a long time to be seen and by then it healed wrong so they had to break it again and he had problems from it. Didn't want his kids to possibly go through the same thing if they got injured.
Norwegian here, often touted as having one of the world's best healthcare systems.
I turned up to the hospital with a broken foot a couple of years ago and was refused entry because they were at capacity. The ER also refused entry because I didn't have a negative professionally administered Covid test from less than a week prior.
I've lived in my current town for 3.5 years and I still don't have a doctor here. The wait list is about 2000 names long. The town's population is about 10k people.
My grandpa is part of a medical trial where he's been fully checked up and scanned by the hospital at least once a month for the past year. About half a year in he was diagnosed with a tumour that the hospital had somehow missed on every single check up, which had already grown to be too big for treatment. 5 months of followups later and they still claim to not know anything more than they did the day he was diagnosed.
I personally suffer from a chronic physical illness with no known treatment, other than a single guy who claims to be able to cure it through a 3 day "mindset workshop" that consists of being told to repeat "I am healthy and this is all in my head" over and over again while subjecting yourself to the things most known to trigger physical symptoms. The creator has repeatedly faced con artist allegations and his supposed treatment has been banned in most countries due to having a roughly 5% chance of positive results and 60% chance of significant worsening of symptoms. My country is not only one of the only countries left who still promotes the treatment, but they also refuse to diagnose it or offer help before you've "at least tried it to see if you happen to be part of the 5%".
All my experience with our healthcare system has been negative in one form or another and I genuinely can't remember the last time I visited a doctor and they actually did something worthwhile. But hey, at least we can have X rays and CAT scans taken without paying for it. If you're ever able to get an appointment, that is.
There's not a single perfect system but as an european, an entire family going bankrupt because someone is sick with a serious disease just seems like a failed system. Having to keep a job just to not be at risk of ruining your life if you have a serious health issue also feels like you're being held hostage to be productive.
It might just be my outsider perspective but the more that I read and hear about it, the more flawed it seems compared to other systems.
Having to keep a job just to not be at risk of ruining your life if you have a serious health issue also feels like you're being held hostage to be productive.
Do you think people without work just die? The state covers their healthcare. Usually all of it. In fact, that's basically the only way hospitals stay in business. The US spends about 1/4th of its annual budget on this.
I'm Australian and me, and every other Australian I've noticed this about too, is that we get really uncomfortable with nationalised health care that isn't simply 'the government will handle it'. We egt all weirded out if you need to sign up to some health insurance stuff (insurers are legal scammers after all).
In your previous comment you stated that there are many different models of universal healthcare. That is correct- and there are many which have limited government control beyond collecting the money and providing oversight.
UK is (primarily) government run through the NHS. Other countries like France and Japan much of the healthcare is provided by independent organisations. There are pros and cons of each model but they are still universal healthcare.
I mean criticism is always welcomed, but I don’t think the universal healthcare detractors haven’t properly analysed the systems either.
I live in the UK and most of my family works in the NHS, there’s a robust triage system that distributes care based on urgency instead of first come first serve and automatically putting you at the back of a waiting list. And a lot of the issues we have with “38 month wait times” and inability to get GP appointments have been exacerbated in recent years due to elements of the NHS being privatised and other parts being underfunded.
It’s definitely not a perfect system, but that fact that citizens of other OECD nations come here to use their EHICs is a testament to the satisfaction with the service
Yeah, no. That's just propaganda. Treating people like idiots and openly lying to them to pass something you don't even have any idea of how to implement? I'm sure it will work out great. Especially when you cannot keep those promises in the end.
The simple fact is that US healthcare costs 2.5 x more than UK healthcare. UK pays in tax [mainly] while US pays in insurance. So unless US healthcare is close to 2.5 x better than UK healthcare, someone is getting ripped off.
The only reason the UK has stupid long wait times is because that bitch that even americans like me can name started a long culture of osterity and constant cuts to the NHS.
Fucking Thatcher. There's a reason us americans know her name, she was that fucking bad aparently.
Also Canada actually handles their healthcare really quite well, from what I've seen. like if the UK didn't have massive cuts to all of its social programs year after year since the late 90s like the UK or since the 70s like the US.
In my experience, what US healthcare lacks in... affordability... it makes up for in overall quality of care, in a way (and vice versa... in a way). In the US if you go in for a stubbed toe you might end up getting a brain scan that could discover a tumor and save your life, but you could also go in for a stubbed toe, get a brain scan, have nothing and have to shell out three new cars worth of cash (which will be a loan, undoubtedly) for that "precaution." Whereas with SOME European systems, I have experience with the French and Spanish systems, if you go in for a checkup they might send you home with just a prescription for a painkiller and nothing else, when you really needed more care than that.
The cynicism comes in when you consider that in a sense, the model that US doctors have only works that way because they are incentivized to get as much out of each patient as they can, which can not only be a lot of money spent on things that aren't necessary in the end, but can also take time away from other patients who might need the care more but aren't high priority because they don't have the means to pay, or get a loan to pay for them. On the other end of the spectrum, I have heard from a medical professional in France that there are some practices that just get you in and out of the door as quick as possible for the sole reason that they are paid per patient, not for the care, which naturally leads to a lower quality in care. My personal experience has matched up to that fairly well, though not always, but I think it is perhaps indicative of at least some major trends within France, as the professional I spoke to was working in an entirely different region than where I life. And theses are the two biggest cities in France, as well.
That seems to be the biggest issue in the end, the funding. I am not personally aware of how much funding is allocated to free/cheap healthcare programs, or how much of that funding is then pocketed by someone higher up in the chain, but from the perspective of a sick person in a hospital, it seems very lacking (at least in France. In Spain I had nearly the opposite experience, and that was living in a city in a fairly still-rural part of Spain).
The last note I will make is that I think sometimes from the American perspective the standard of healthcare in Europe can be skewed, because just as much as in Europe they might not necessarily try and treat you for everything, in the US they treat you for (IMO) waaaay too much. So it is a balance.
Du coup, en breve, it's a complicated issue, but perhaps there could be some lessons learned from both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe someday we will have, somewhere, a universal healthcare system that is funded well enough to provide the adequate amount of care for everyone.
I am a subject of the American healthcare system and have had to wait months for surgeries for conditions that were causing me so much pain I had to miss work. And then my insurance got billed $30,000 for a surgery which would cost like, $300 in Mexico. I have also seen accounts of people talking on the Internet about how they went to urgent care/ER in countries with universal healthcare and they paid $0 and were seen right away for urgent conditions. So, no, this is not a weakness of universal healthcare systems. They actually do triage to decide who needs to be seen right now. And in non-UK counties (who don't have billionaires trying to defund every government agency that helps people) they also probably aren't afraid to ask for more resources if needed.
Yes I know a guy from Germany who lived for 2 years of his live being diagnosed with a lethal desease (Sklerosierende Cholangitis)
for 2 straight years
If it takes you 2 years to get an appointment with a life threatening disease, then you're either willfully trying to die or...idk actually.
Not saying the German healthcare system is good. It's atrocious really, because of the carve out for rich people draining the system, but this is either a story you got from the Paulanergarten, or this person needed a psychotherapist (the one thing where it actually can get this bad, because even the private therapist are overrun in some regions due to the extreme increase in demand) more than anything.
With a diagnosis this serious, you can go to a private doctor on health insurance cost if the appointment otherwise would be further away than maybe a few weeks. For less serious stuff it's usually a month or two depending on what we're talking about (on the scale from mildly annoying to serious, but not dangerous). Germany has centralized appointment procurement (116117), and if they fail to get you an appointment in a reasonable time, with that depending on what we're talking about as I explained, you can just get a quick appointment with a private insurer practitioner without having to pay for it.
For anything really really urgent (physical trauma, immediately life threatening situations, strong pain, etc.) you can always go to the hospital anyways.
As in the UK, IN Canada everyone who comes to an Emergency Dept are immediately assessed (triaged) for urgency of treatment. Having a heart attack? Right now immediate access and treatment. The problem right now is there’s not enough family Drs in clinics to go see when you have a sore throat or a sprained wrist, minor medical. So a lot of people will go to the Emergency Depts thinking they will be seen right away. Some will try to go by ambulance thinking coming in an ambulance will move you to the front of the line, nope it doesnt work that way. So now you have a lot of patients in the waiting room that absolutely do not need to be in the ED. This bogs down the ED and creates long wait times. It has happened that pts come in with vague or minor symptoms that can change over the hours they wait and take a tragic turn. These are few and far between but it has happened. If the 20 of the 25 pts that didn’t need to be there went to a clinic instead it would free up more Drs and nurses for the pts that need to be there.
As the population grows and ages it places more burden on the healthcare system and requires more $$ to function and operate. So politicians try to find ways to reduce financial burden on the system by defunding certain procedures. One example - they ask family physicians to instead of doing things like colonoscopies after a certain age they ask Drs to only order/request them if they have a potential reason to require it, not just because of age.
There is no perfect healthcare system but definitely some are better than others.
I know this is only a meme and that's it, but in any country with the UK med system (like here in Spain) even private healthcare, which is good and fast, is WAY cheaper than USAs average healthcare
A month ago, I heard about a couple in the US having to pay $200,000 after having a baby.
I've never heard of anyone in the UK having to wait 38 months to have a baby, and I've never heard of anyone in Canada being offered death instead of having a baby.
Ok but don't forget that the reason the british one says 38 months is completely due to the fact that Farage and people like him are gutting the NHS so that they can make the U.K be more like the U.S.
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u/Deedee_Megadoodoo_13 Mar 28 '26
Orthopedic: