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Totally false. If you are in Caribbean country for example, and get services, if you don't pay you will literally not be allowed to leave the country until you

Totally false. If you are in Caribbean country for example, and get services, if you don't pay you will literally not be allowed to leave the country until you settle up. Generally the costs are fractions of what they are in the US. But they are not playing - they don't have confidence that once you are back in US or wherever that you'll pay. Some countries even have exit fees etc. You are there until you pay to leave.

kilroy123 5y ago
Lots of other countries do this as well, outside of the Caribbean.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Yeah - they "arrested" the vessel I was on once until someone's medical bill was settled up (not mine). Certainly worked, company involved wired money promptly. The other thing - you can be turned away for lack of payment more easily (or just not get great care) in other countries. In the US you can do a $10M bill on critical care at a hospital without paying anything - that just doesn't happen in some other countries in most cases - they don't have the $10M lying around etc or have more competing needs so you just can't stay on full support for years the way you might in US.
  - ikr678 5y ago
    In most other countries, that same level of critical care would not even come close to $10M. The sticker price of healthcare in the US is so wildly inflated as to be meaningless.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      Other countries don't come close to keeping people alive as long as folks try in the US. New Jersey for example allows for a religious objection to a medical declaration of brain death etc. As long as your heart keeps pumping you can be called alive and provided with intensive care (for years). And yes, your heart pumping can be mechanically driven, they can do feeding tubes and IV's etc - so this means "alive" for a very long time. We need to be clear - that other countries will not provide govt or mandatory care in these types of cases. In places like New Jersey - it is a crime to stop providing care (even when person is fully brain dead) or to stop paying for care if someone has a religious belief someone is alive. “No health care practitioner or other health care provider, and no health service plan, insurer, or governmental authority, shall deny coverage or exclude from the benefits of service any individual solely because of that individual’s personal religious beliefs regarding the application of neurological criteria for declaring death.” You can imagine the costs of these types of laws. There is a small industry in places like California which cap malpractice awards in cases of death but don't if someone is alive to get folks to new jersey where they can be kept "alive" indefinitely to maximum legal payouts etc.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Looking into the human rights campaigns about this from Chatham House we have "• In some parts of the world it is common practice for patients to be detained in hospital for non-payment of healthcare bills. • Such detentions occur in public as well as private medical facilities, and there appears to be wide societal acceptance in certain countries of the assumed right of health providers to imprison vulnerable people in this way. • The true scale of these hospital detention practices, or ‘medical detentions’, is unknown, but the limited academic research to date suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are likely to be affected every year.... Women requiring life-saving emergency caesarean sections, and their babies, are particularly vulnerable to detention in medical facilities."
anm89 5y ago
Yeah the grand irony of comments like this is that it is a brand of thinking that is actually very characteristic of a specific group of Americans who blindly view the rest of the world as some utopia(and they are mostly just equating Europe with the rest of the world here) and America as this embodiment of everything terrible. So you get to seem worldly while in my mind projecting a very limited view of the realities of the broader world. Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten now) has an amazing piece on the sociology and psychology of the phenomenon of "Blue/Left American's" who enjoying trash talking America where he points out that these people who make an identity out of trash talking "America" as well as things like white men who write articles about "how terrible white men are" are not being self critical because those terms in this context are a code word for "Red/Right America" who are stereotypically more openly patriotic. So it creates this great rhetorical tool of getting to seem humble and self critical on the surface while everyone knows you are really just complaining about the other side. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... Truly one of my favorite things I have ever read. Put words on so many things that I felt but struggled to articulate. Worth pointing out that I don't identify with conservative or right politics. I know because I'm critiquing one side here but it's not an indication of me being on the other side. I just find it to be an interesting point that matches my lived experience. I'm also an American expat.

kilroy123 5y ago

Lots of other countries do this as well, outside of the Caribbean.

slownews45 5y ago
Yeah - they "arrested" the vessel I was on once until someone's medical bill was settled up (not mine). Certainly worked, company involved wired money promptly. The other thing - you can be turned away for lack of payment more easily (or just not get great care) in other countries. In the US you can do a $10M bill on critical care at a hospital without paying anything - that just doesn't happen in some other countries in most cases - they don't have the $10M lying around etc or have more competing needs so you just can't stay on full support for years the way you might in US.
- ikr678 5y ago
  In most other countries, that same level of critical care would not even come close to $10M. The sticker price of healthcare in the US is so wildly inflated as to be meaningless.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Other countries don't come close to keeping people alive as long as folks try in the US. New Jersey for example allows for a religious objection to a medical declaration of brain death etc. As long as your heart keeps pumping you can be called alive and provided with intensive care (for years). And yes, your heart pumping can be mechanically driven, they can do feeding tubes and IV's etc - so this means "alive" for a very long time. We need to be clear - that other countries will not provide govt or mandatory care in these types of cases. In places like New Jersey - it is a crime to stop providing care (even when person is fully brain dead) or to stop paying for care if someone has a religious belief someone is alive. “No health care practitioner or other health care provider, and no health service plan, insurer, or governmental authority, shall deny coverage or exclude from the benefits of service any individual solely because of that individual’s personal religious beliefs regarding the application of neurological criteria for declaring death.” You can imagine the costs of these types of laws. There is a small industry in places like California which cap malpractice awards in cases of death but don't if someone is alive to get folks to new jersey where they can be kept "alive" indefinitely to maximum legal payouts etc.
slownews45 5y ago
Looking into the human rights campaigns about this from Chatham House we have "• In some parts of the world it is common practice for patients to be detained in hospital for non-payment of healthcare bills. • Such detentions occur in public as well as private medical facilities, and there appears to be wide societal acceptance in certain countries of the assumed right of health providers to imprison vulnerable people in this way. • The true scale of these hospital detention practices, or ‘medical detentions’, is unknown, but the limited academic research to date suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are likely to be affected every year.... Women requiring life-saving emergency caesarean sections, and their babies, are particularly vulnerable to detention in medical facilities."

anm89 5y ago

Yeah the grand irony of comments like this is that it is a brand of thinking that is actually very characteristic of a specific group of Americans who blindly view the rest of the world as some utopia(and they are mostly just equating Europe with the rest of the world here) and America as this embodiment of everything terrible. So you get to seem worldly while in my mind projecting a very limited view of the realities of the broader world. Slate Star Codex (Astral Codex Ten now) has an amazing piece on the sociology and psychology of the phenomenon of "Blue/Left American's" who enjoying trash talking America where he points out that these people who make an identity out of trash talking "America" as well as things like white men who write articles about "how terrible white men are" are not being self critical because those terms in this context are a code word for "Red/Right America" who are stereotypically more openly patriotic. So it creates this great rhetorical tool of getting to seem humble and self critical on the surface while everyone knows you are really just complaining about the other side. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... Truly one of my favorite things I have ever read. Put words on so many things that I felt but struggled to articulate. Worth pointing out that I don't identify with conservative or right politics. I know because I'm critiquing one side here but it's not an indication of me being on the other side. I just find it to be an interesting point that matches my lived experience. I'm also an American expat.