Our healthcare system is so broken

[sabbat hunter]

A dear friend of mine was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer on March 3rd. She was going to start treatment, when she was feeling very weak on Saturday March 15th, could not keep her balance. Then she started to slur her speech, so she was taken back to the hospital.
She had a small stroke. On top of that her liver was failing, ammonia and calcium levels were high. Cancer was spreading rapidly. On Tuesday March 25th her husband made the hardest decision of his life, and to move his wife to palliative care only. She was given only a week or so to live. She did not even last that long. She died early on Wednesday March 26th.

For those three weeks of in and out hospitalization, antibiotics, pain meds, tests, etc costs were over $300k. Thankfully they had insurance, and their costs is "only" $18k.
$300k. She didn't even get to receive any chemo. This is why our healthcare system is completely broken. Those costs are astronomical.

I had wanted to go see her in April, after passover, after her initial diagnosis. But I never did get to do so given how fast she went.
If I am able to share the gofundme that I set up for her husband to get bills paid, etc. here I would. But I believe that goes against the rules.

[yourout]

1. I have a friend from New Zealand and he said there..

You will never get a medical bill.
It may not be perfect but it's light years better than what we have.

[marybourg]

2. Sorry for the loss of a dear friend. But I'm amazed that her

family has firm numbers both for the total bill and her share at this early stage.

I was hospitalized in Nov and Dec, and only a few scattered bills have shown up at this point. i have no way of knowing what the total bill or my share will be.

[Skittles]

3. "healthcare" for profit is OBSCENE

SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED

[misanthrope]

5. That is blasphemy in the United States

“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831

[Silent Type]

4. The hospital was happy to get $18K. Not sure why they continue to bill high amounts when they know insurance, Medicare,

etc., will only pay $20K or so. And no uninsured can even pay the $20 K.

It goes back to early years (60s) when Medicare and private insurance paid based upon cost, meaning hospitals had no motive to control costs.

[buzzycrumbhunger]

6. It's worse than you can imagine

The “for profit” angle is killing us. Literally.

I’m a pharmacy tech and my latest nightmare is a new drug to treat blepharitis caused by fucking eye mites, of all things. It’s the only drug of its kind, so the price is ridiculous—almost $2400 for a 5 mL bottle (a 6-week treatment). No way in hell it costs this much to make, it’s just the only such drug there is yet.

So how are people paying for this? If they make under a certain threshold of income—$102,000 married and $75,000 single—there’s a copay assistance program where if they qualify, their copay is $0. Who runs this glorious foundation? THE COMPANY THAT MAKES THE DRUG—who then writes off the “loss” on their own taxes.

There are similar programs for drugs that run $8000, $9000, $80,000 A MONTH, and the drug companies are raking in the bucks doing this.

Lots of drugs here cost a mere fraction in other countries. There’s a cancer drug in India that costs $4/pill. Here, it’s thousands. Ozempic in Germany? $5 copay. Here? GLP-1 drugs average around $5000.

It’s depressing. Every damned thing is geared to cost us as much as possible whilst garnering maximum profits for shareholders in these companies.

I previously worked in acute care transcription for years. I saw how big a percentage of people have lousy or no insurance, so they use the ER as their primary care—and then never pay the bill. (Our public hospital will often cover meds prescribed as a 30-day trial, so many folks go without after that—and wind up back in the ER repeatedly for the same problems.) We’re told that these “freeloaders” are the reason healthcare costs are so high—because the rest of us are covering their freebies.

Nope. It’s fucking greed contaminating the whole system. My favourite hospital to transcribe for was in Toronto, and NOTHING worked this way.

I really, really hoped we’d have a mass of Luigi clones by now trying to fix this crap. Unfortunately, everyone’s distracted by the fascist takeover and resistance efforts are scattered.

No reason at all that we should be the only “first-world country” to not have socialized healthcare except that capitalism is the worst cancer of all.