Watching a man die from HIV with dementia on a forensic psych ward because his family refused to take him back but also wouldn't sign the DNR.

Watching a nurse shove a softball sized chunk of woundvac foam into a bedsore so deep you could see bare bone at the bottom.

Having to hold a woman down who's screaming and clawing at me as a nurse shoves a rectal tube into her because they gave her laxatives so she could shit out all the ammonia her alcoholic liver couldn't process anymore but now the ammonia is starting to dissolve her anus but it's already too far gone to hold the anchor donut so they just keep trying to reinsert it for almost an hour because she's so sick and so out of it that her family have power of attorney and "do everything you can, don't just let her die!"

Being assigned to sit with a man to keep him from pulling off his ventilator mask and every time he manages it he can barely even say just let me die and the only thing that keeps him from trying to rip it off again is me summarizing the plots of the last five books I read because his family has also decided he should have to live.

Discharging barely coherent psych patients back to the street because we need the bed to get somebody even less coherent off the street.

Getting a man from the ER who couldn't stand after a drug overdose because the ER nurses assumed he was faking.

Having to tell an intensivist that I don't know how long a man's oxygen saturation has been in the 70s because he was on a psych hold so his 2h trip down from the mountains was in the back of a cop car. When we gave him oxygen his speech instantly cleared up. He had a history of schizophrenia, so they just assumed that's what it was.

All the people that try to kill themselves to escape group homes and assisted living.

All the people getting most of their mental Healthcare in prison and jail.

I'll let you know what else I remember.

Americans surely must understand by now that they're only seen as consumers, statistics, a unit from which money can be extracted. They're not seen and treated as humans.

Americans who lived abroad, what do you think about this?

We're not lacking in "system", that's part of what we're overpaying so much for. It's the "care" part that's lacking.

Sparing loved ones of financial hardship is one of the noblest reasons to die. What a fucked up sentence.

Friend of mine became extremely sick. Doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong, but his life became pain and insomnia. After many torturous years, he was tired of being bedridden and miserable. He couldn't end it; his wife would lose her health insurance through his employer. So he walked off into the woods.

He's been legally missing for a few years now. He made sure to bring his ID with him, in case he is found one day.

That's the American healthcare system.

Why do we still live here: if we could leave, we would. We've been trying.

The US healthcare system is a hostage situation.

Why would anyone live there? Let alone believe it's the best country in the world

Even Go Fund Me came out and said, uh, wait, funding health care isn't what we really intended for the platform.

I recall one of the coaches of a major league baseball team had some major illness and had set up a GoFundMe for it...the team decided to cover it, fortunately, but...come on.

I don't know how anyone can seriously claim there's nothing wrong with our system, but they do.

One guy said, in earnest, that it's a good thing that our medical system is so expensive - because that means it's a good system. (This was in response to me saying that I think our technology and care are pretty good; it's how we pay for it that's the main issue.)

How do you even respond to that? I just ignored him. Does he think Europe has cut-rate health care? Canada?

There's a certain irony between people having insurance who also need a gofundme... It begs the question, what exactly is the purpose of the insurance?

Off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things my conservative family members or distant acquaintances would say and agree with:

What if somebody else gets more than me?

What if somebody who doesn’t “deserve” benefits gets them?

Why should I give a shit or have to pay for other people? (Unaware of how insurance itself works)

The economyyyyy!

US healthcare is extortion.

This is my plan when a major illness rears its head.

It's designed that way and I hate it.

I've already had this talk with my daughter. I'm not presently ill or anything, but I see this as the new American version of estate planning.

Somehow, I've managed to build up a few meager assets to leave to my daughter and I'll be damned if I let American healthcare take it all.

(And please refrain from bringing up misinformed statements on estate tax. I'm a tax accountant. I'm more astute on that stuff than most of the population, and my little pile of shiny trinkets is well below any threshold for any of that to kick in)

I was just telling my wife last week that I would go end it in the woods before wasting or life savings on treatments that probably won’t cure me.

This was just a hypothetical convo I’m not sick.

Yep, that tracks.

Fucking hell, this is brutal

Speaking of "non-system," wouldn’t Go Fund Me be mad about that? I’ve heard they’re really anal about using funds in any way that deviates from the stated purpose.

Everybody in this country needs to lift themselves up by the bootstraps and do what I did: have a chronic disease that is so ridiculously expensive to treat that the pharma company pays your deductible and out of pocket max for you so that you’ll stay on it. Then you get actual coverage for the rest of the year!

I’m a software engineer and my health insurance pays out significantly more than my gross pay every year. U-S-A!

My father told me he would retire himself if he ever had to go to a nursing home