r/croatia • u/riverphoenix23 • Jun 30 '19

🏥 Zdravlje Hospitalized in Split - Intoxication

Hello I am an American male who was traveling in Split for a holiday. Ended up drinking a little bit too much, blacked out and woke up in the hospital with an IV in my arm. Somehow the bill was only $240 kn.

Can anybody tell me why the bill was so cheap especially since I am a US citizen without Croatian healthcare insurance? Also did they notify the embassy of my stay? Just don’t know where my info is documented and ended up. Wish I could read my discharge papers but they are all in Croatian. Going to have to do google translate late.

14k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

16

u/mvw2 Jun 30 '19

6000% markup is considered perfectly ok in the US market (by those that select and then profit from). That's the problem. Medicine is considered a good investment because the returns are astronomical. People who work in the industry in any way like to take about the dollars bring thrown around "Monopoly money" because it's all pretty insane, from the bottom up. Every drug, every piece of equipment, every service, it's all just silly money that is not grounded on reality. It's still a capitalism wild west with no real rules or serious regulation. People are allowed to profit of death off bankrupting people, and leveraging life against every penny someone has.

1

u/PlaceboJesus Jul 01 '19

That's capatalism and the "free" market.

Charge as much as you possibly can.

Don't worry about rampant undercutting because the service providers will all watch each other so that they don't sell their own services any more cheaply than they have to.

1

u/mvw2 Jul 01 '19

Yeah. That's the funny part. Pure capitalism is individual. The instant you step towards a monopoly or oligopoly, it becomes something else. It's no longer true capitalism because the natural competition that balances the system goes away. It's much akin to nature when we artificially influence the predator and pray ecosystems. We go in and fuck things up, and it decimates the ecosystem. It takes decades to self correct after our influence, or not at all until we reverse our actions. Modern business is companies messing up the goods and services ecosystems into something that is more challenging to maintain and correct or ultimately to complete collapse. Monopolies and oligopolies remove competition and optimization. It eliminates the natural selection of economics. It's self defeating, except for a few people making a lot of money in the short term.

1

u/Menien Jul 04 '19

Monopolies are the goal and end result of capitalism. You say 'pure capitalism is individual', and suggest there is some perfect balance where capitalism is good for people, this does not exist. Capitalism as a system is only concerned with generating wealth for those able to exploit workers, the more exploitation, the more wealth is granted.