4 ms·
Important note on ER care. The job of the ER is to prevent you from dying, not fix you. If you are injured in a way that requires an expensive surgery and the
by saalweachter 9y ago
Important note on ER care.
The job of the ER is to prevent you from dying, not fix you. If you are injured in a way that requires an expensive surgery and therapy to fix but won't actually kill you if left untreated, even if it cripples you, they are not obligated to fix you under the law.
- swarnie_ 9y agoHow did your healthcare system get messed up to such a level? This is criminal in western Europe.
- saalweachter 9y agoThe short answer is racism and greed.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoAmerican Exceptionalism combined with FUD.
- lr4444lr 9y agoIt goes back to WWII when we had a strange price controls on labor. Health insurance was a way for employers to provide employ compensation circumventing that. Originally it was quite manageable, but as with any system where neither the consumer nor the producer of the good/service has any incentive to keep down costs, it spiraled out of control. Also, president Richard Nixon effectively linked national health care with socialism as part of Cold War propaganda. (That said, he did offer comprehensive health reform too that in a number of ways was more dramatic than we achieved under president Obama, but the congress killed it.)
- eli 9y agoAnd of course this is bad for everyone involved. We don't pay for someone to get preventative or proactive treatments for a chronic condition, instead choosing to divert very expensive ER resources to treat as a series of emergency interventions. Worse for the patient, worse for the hospital, worse for anyone else paying into the system.