Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I got dysentery so you don’t have to

eukaryotewritesblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#51

Post by throwway120385 »

cheschire wrote: post #35
Waterluvian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno if it’s really so simplistic. I hear the wait time complaint about Canada a lot but it’s partly because we care for everyone, so sometimes you’ve got to wait if you’re not in real trouble. Especially with emergency care it’s quite fast. Back in August my son fell off the monkey bars and his elbow exploded. Ambulance in 7 mins. Hospital triage in 5 mins. Doctor 5 mins after. X-ray took 5 mins. Waited 7 mins. D…

Since you have a specific anecdote as an argument, could you expand on your “American approach” concept and how it applies to your situation? I don’t mean talk in vague assertions about how you have read some other specific yet unrelated anecdotes about childbirth costing $125,000 or something. I mean how much would your son’s specific situation cost you in a comparable area of America for a family of comparable inco…

I can speak to even routine things like a childbirth still costing thousands of dollars with "good" insurance with a "low" out of pocket maximum and 100% coverage after the deductible.

It still cost 3 or 4 thousand dollars. So it's not necessarily those six figure costs that are tough to deal with but even routine hospital care that gets very expensive in the US. I'm fortunate that we can afford that cost. But for a lot of people even making the payments on that would be a hardship. We didn't even know it would cost that much even though we had called our insurance to try to figure it out. Nobody can tell you how much it will cost until you incur the cost which is absurd. And the hospital "price lists" are beyond useless.

It shouldn't cost anything to birth a child in a hospital setting like a birth center in any civilized country, and we shouldn't have to deal with billing issues and insurance companies in the insane first 12 weeks of a child's life when we're sleep deprived and just dealing with actual medical issues and adjustment. We've spent collectively hours on the phone with insurance for this and various other charges. The "private payer" "employer provided" system constantly produces bad experiences and outcomes for everyone. Every insurance provider I've had over the past 5 years is a company that constantly screws up and that I can't fire, unlike my car insurance.

The American healthcare system doesn't bankrupt us right away, but it does so slowly by bleeding us for costs we shouldn't have to pay and by robbing us of time right when we need it most.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#52

Post by wishinghand »

cheschire wrote: post #32
bilekas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Articles like this are a nice reminder of just how wonderful life is in America, and just how far civilization has to fall if shit REALLY hits the fan someday. While I agree its cool to see progress. If I get sick in the US and need medical attention, just fly me back to Europe. Id rather not go bankrupt.

Sure you might not have the financial burden but actually getting attention is not as straightforward as I infer from your wording. Wait times in much of Europe are kind of ridiculous. One isn’t better than the other. There are trade offs. Your preference appears to be financial.

Wait times in the USA suck. I just moved to a west coast city, need to set up new doctors. Soonest I could get for an endocrinologist is February, and I made the appointment a month ago.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#53

Post by foobarian »

retsibsi wrote: post #48
meindnoch wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indoor cats don't have any pathogens that you don't already.

This seems too strong. Assuming they're 100% indoor, you could say they don't have any pathogens that haven't at some point been present in your house. But that's not so comforting.

I hope you never look at household dust under a microscope

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#54

Post by renewiltord »

bilekas wrote: post #26
lqstuart wrote: post #4

Articles like this are a nice reminder of just how wonderful life is in America, and just how far civilization has to fall if shit REALLY hits the fan someday. If you need a reason to be grateful in spite of mundane crap like housing costs and white collar jobs, the developing world offers some lessons in humility and gratitude.

> Articles like this are a nice reminder of just how wonderful life is in America, and just how far civilization has to fall if shit REALLY hits the fan someday. While I agree its cool to see progress. If I get sick in the US and need medical attention, just fly me back to Europe. Id rather not go bankrupt.

I’d go to somewhere like India that has medical tourism. Any procedure that you can wait long enough to fly to Europe will have a long waitlist there.

Besides I was completely blown up in the US on my motorcycle with fractures all over and in the ICU for days and I paid a grand total of $2k. I think it was pretty cool honestly.

There was some therapy afterwards that cost a little more but overall I’m back to normal except for a few thousand. Since I make hundreds of thousands more this feels like a good deal.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#55

Post by atrus »

echelon wrote: post #45
bilekas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait times in much of Europe are kind of ridiculous. It's prioritized as per need, for example elective/preventative operations or procedures will be delayed if there is a new higher level emergency, this makes practical sense given the nature of healthcare and I have never had a problem with that. It's slightly off topic though, my comment was off the cuff but it's a reality. > Your preference appears to be financ…

> Well regardless of financial accessibility if you can justify why in the US the markup of pharmaceuticals is so extraordinarily high for everything vs the rest of the world ? We do a lot of the (very expensive) drug discovery and testing.

And that means those same drugs, from those same companies are now cheaper outside of the US? That makes zero sense. That's like Amazon charging their employees 100x to use AWS vs outside people.

They charge more in the US because they can, because of people who gleefully accept it and defend it by saying "we do a lot of expensive drug discovery and testing"

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#56

Post by cheschire »

Waterluvian wrote: post #42
cheschire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you have a specific anecdote as an argument, could you expand on your “American approach” concept and how it applies to your situation? I don’t mean talk in vague assertions about how you have read some other specific yet unrelated anecdotes about childbirth costing $125,000 or something. I mean how much would your son’s specific situation cost you in a comparable area of America for a family of comparable inco…

I made the mistake of touching on a complicated, important, and oft-contentious topic just before starting my work day. Not ghosting you, but I'll do my best to get back to this when I have the time required to offer a worthwhile response.

Same. I appreciate the reply but apparently this beehive isn’t worth kicking here. Seems like folks don’t know how to avoid the downvote button on emotional topics. I would love to have a deeper conversation about it but HN probably isn’t the place where I will find intellectual satisfaction on this topic.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#57

Post by n8henrie »

lqstuart wrote: post #4

Articles like this are a nice reminder of just how wonderful life is in America, and just how far civilization has to fall if shit REALLY hits the fan someday. If you need a reason to be grateful in spite of mundane crap like housing costs and white collar jobs, the developing world offers some lessons in humility and gratitude.

I love and work in emergency medicine in the US. We still see Shigella on the Navajo Nation, where many of our patients do not have electricity or running water at their home.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#58

Post by GJim »

renewiltord wrote: post #54
bilekas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Articles like this are a nice reminder of just how wonderful life is in America, and just how far civilization has to fall if shit REALLY hits the fan someday. While I agree its cool to see progress. If I get sick in the US and need medical attention, just fly me back to Europe. Id rather not go bankrupt.

I’d go to somewhere like India that has medical tourism. Any procedure that you can wait long enough to fly to Europe will have a long waitlist there. Besides I was completely blown up in the US on my motorcycle with fractures all over and in the ICU for days and I paid a grand total of $2k. I think it was pretty cool honestly. There was some therapy afterwards that cost a little more but overall I’m back to normal e…

> in the ICU for days and I paid a grand total of $2k

My wife paid a grand total of £0

The very _idea_ we would need to pay money for such medical treatment is bizarre.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#59

Post by akhosravian »

GJim wrote: post #58
renewiltord wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d go to somewhere like India that has medical tourism. Any procedure that you can wait long enough to fly to Europe will have a long waitlist there. Besides I was completely blown up in the US on my motorcycle with fractures all over and in the ICU for days and I paid a grand total of $2k. I think it was pretty cool honestly. There was some therapy afterwards that cost a little more but overall I’m back to normal e…

> in the ICU for days and I paid a grand total of $2k My wife paid a grand total of £0 The very _idea_ we would need to pay money for such medical treatment is bizarre.

The idea that it costs nothing somehow is bizarre.

If you divide the NHS budget for 2024 (192 billion) by the UK population (67 million) you’ll find it works out to just under 3000 pounds per person just for 2024.

Assuming your wife’s visit was this year your family paid about 3x what the poster you are responding to did.

I’m also working from the assumption most posters here are in high tax brackets; I understand tech jobs in Europe pay much worse than the US so that may not be true.

Re: I got dysentery so you don’t have to

#60

Post by alyandon »

blahedo wrote: post #38
cheschire wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you might not have the financial burden but actually getting attention is not as straightforward as I infer from your wording. Wait times in much of Europe are kind of ridiculous. One isn’t better than the other. There are trade offs. Your preference appears to be financial.

Wait times in the US are also ridiculous. A couple years ago I tried to make a doctor's appt, at the clinic where I was regularly a patient, and had decent insurance, but it was for check-up stuff and to ask some questions. I called in July; the first available appointment was December . On the other hand, when I've gone to that clinic with urgent issues, they see me the same day. I gather it is much the same in syst…

I'm seeing this trend as well. It is getting to the point that I can not see my primary doctor without a 2-3 month lead time and specialist referrals are often 2-3 months as well.

Hell, I recently had to find a new dentist because the one I had been going to for years suddenly had 4-6 month lead time if I needed to reschedule a routine cleaning.

Post reply on HN