291–300 of 311 posts
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People do not pay $500k bills for strokes, that's not possible.
"Do people pay $500k hospital bills?" and "Do people receive $500k hospital bills?" are two different questions.
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A bicycle accident bill can be over 100k USD without any surgery or being admitted overnight. Having a stroke can be 500-600k which might cause another upon seeing the bill.
The US healthcare system is all kinds of messed up, but this sounds like FUD territory. I was hospitalized for 12 days earlier this year for what ended up being a heart issue. Not as "exciting" as a stroke perhaps but I'd have ended up very dead without modern medicine. The total bill sent to insurance was $85k and I ended up having to pay $5k.
And I had a powered vehicle collision that cost ~$83k without any surgery. The care was so bad (waiting 4 hours for stitches) and when they wanted to admit me, I said to myself "fuck it, I want to get some real sleep at home where I won't be woken every 45 minutes just so they can pad the bill even more as an expensive hotel." I got up and walked out. Minus CT and MRI, I could've done what they did in 3 hours what took them 18. 3 broken bones (T-8, nose, and shoulder) and they kept pushing me to take opiates. The pain was tolerable because it was a high-energy impact with clean breaks.
Also, around 2016, I spoke with a young lady in coffee shop in Redding CA who had a nasal infusion pump with a small tube taped to her face. She was preparing her documentation to attend a bankruptcy hearing across the street. She had stage IV terminal cancer and the doctors and hospitals were trying to take everything she owned while she was alive. 62% of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills and 78% had some form of insurance that obvious didn't help them.
I suggest you might want to get out more and talk to people. The US healthcare system is a fucking racket. People with the privilege of good health insurance rarely get outside of their bubble because "they got theirs" and assume everyone else has the same opportunities and protections. That's not the reality.
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Social security is 20% of your salary in Lithuania. 50€ if you're unemployed. Although it does cover healthcare, unemployment and part of retirement pensions. Probably something more, but I don't know further details.
Do you know what is the actual spend per capita and does 50 cover it? Sounds like a good metric to go by. P.S. not a fan how the social taxes are collected since whenever you are supposed to get benefits it’s always capped at some ridiculous number…
My late grandmother was often slighted and not offered treatment by VA medical personnel because of her age. It was disgusting, overt ageism beyond whether a particular treatment was suitable or not, she was treated as a second-class citizen not worth helping.
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I find it hard to imagine anyone relying on an app to determine whether or not a wild mushroom is edible or not. The poisonous mushrooms (particularly the widely distributed and complex Amanita types) have some of the most insidious biological toxins known, in particular alpha-amanitin, which has a really nasty delayed-action effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Amanitin It's mode of action is so unique (bind…
I couldn't write/ship an app like that.
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You mean like when Europe approved thalidomide but the US said “just because they approved it isn’t good enough” and saved tens of thousands of babies from birth defects?
The fact that the only example you have is 60 years old makes this a terrible argument.
It was on the market between 1976 and 2009, and is thought to have caused between 500 and 2,000 deaths.
Since no one has done it yet, I'll ask the obvious question about the FDA: how many people die or need a liver transplant each year because the FDA is being unreasonable here? Here's some quotes from the article: Approximately 40% of people who ingest the deadly Amanita mushrooms die or require a liver transplant, according to Dr. Pierre Gholam, the liver specialist at University Hospitals who treated Hickman. ... Th…
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I think I read somewhere before about how if a mushroom is white, then stay away from it. How true is this from your experience?
Using that rule of thumb, you would successfully avoid Amanita virosa (destroying angel), but you could still get poisoned by Amanita phalloides (death cap) which has a pale-green cap. I don't endorse any rules-of-thumb for foraging, but a much better differentiator for beginners is whether the mushroom has pores vs. gills under the cap. There are virtually no deadly varieties that have pores.
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With the FDA, you need to follow the money.
Did you? Where did it lead?