I hate being American.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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My kid has cystic fibrosis. The one main drug alone for that condition costs €350k per year. I pay €7.20 prescription fee for it.
The kid spent 4 months in the first year in hospital. Since it was our first child, both of us opted to stay in hospital with the kid in a one-patient room. I tried to figure out how much this was going to cost and the nurses couldn't tell me. They sent me to the billing office (a tiny little room somewhere in a corner of the hospital, which was only staffed for an hour per day). The lady there told me not to worry about it. We never paid a cent for all of that.
Obviously, we don't live in the USA, but in the apparent communist hellscape that is the EU.
€7.20 prescription? Fuck that is so cheap. I had to pay £9.90 for a prescription fee as I don't get them for free since getting full time employment.
... and it's capped to 2% of my yearly income.
In 🇺🇸'murica, hospitals are legally required (at least for now) to treat you for health emergencies (with the exception of chronic conditions like cancer or diabetes).
Go get your treatments and never pay the bill lol. What are they gonna do? Take your non-existent properties? Debts are gone in 7 years.
For chronic conditions tho, you're kinda fucked. They'll treat you for DKA for example, but doesn't legally have to give you insulin once your vitals are stable.
Remember, taking things you need to survive from corporations is the equivalent of self-defence. (Solution is break into the pharmacy in the middle of the night)
Hey anyone remember what that Green video game character is named? I think the name start with L and end with i.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with my doctor last month, and by doctor I mean the nurse practitioner at the clinic but then again I find them better anyway. She came up to me as I was paying on the way out and said I noticed you don't have insurance on your chart here. The prescription we put in for you is very expensive, even with insurance it could be hundreds of dollars without it we're talking over a thousand. So I told her just don't bother sending in the prescription cuz I couldn't do that at all. I mean if I paid for it I wouldn't make rent. So homelessness or this pill. She said what are you going to do? I said just fucking suffer I guess. Then we both just kind of walked away cuz nothing else to say.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I get the feeling this Jesus fellow would very much be against the idea of for-profit healthcare.
Curing lepers? Jesus would be barging into insurance company board meetings and cursing everyone there with leprosy.
Just for people who don't know, several drug companies have major discounts or assistance programs for people who can't afford it. Is worth investigating if you're on a situation like this one. It's fucking stupid to live in this world, but we do.
More people need to be educated on how to order grey market pharmaceuticals. You can't find everything, but when you can, it's often best to bypass the US pharma system entirely. Unfortunately this isn't really viable for acute conditions, but for long-term medications you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't look into overseas pharmacies.
I fucking hate American healthcare.
Someone at my son's pediatrician office let slip that his Covid/flu combo test would've only cost $50 if they wouldn't have run it through insurance.
Naturally, I asked why they didn't just call and tell me that before they ran it through insurance so I could have saved some money.
Her response was "because that would be defrauding the insurance company."
I blew the fuck up on her. To this day, that bill for like $259 for a Covid/flu test hasn't been paid.
What the hell kind of test was it? The boxes of tests only started costing money within the last, I dunno, 1-2 years here in Canada and they don’t even cost that much, only about $20CAD.
Ya’ll literally live in a hellhole with paintjob. It’s like an apartment that looks pretty nice until you realize that the landlord just painted over all the mold on the walls and crossed their fingers that the water leak wasn’t gunna show up until it was at least too late.
Anyway, I’m sorry that you get robbed by the very institutions claiming to be helping you.
Ya’ll literally live in a hellhole with paintjob
Fuck you - that paint job flaked off decades ago.
I say paintjob because there’s still a comparatively “clean” façade compared to countries where most of the people don’t have access to clean drinking water and stuff. It’s the big reason why I hate the US; they could just choose to be better but simply aren’t and they can’t even blame famines or outside influence(well, to some degree) or war within or near their borders. The paint is absolutely flaking off but there’re still a lot of intact patches for people to look at while pretending that everything is ok.
most of the people don’t have access to clean drinking water and stuff
Believe me, we're doing our level best to get there.
We're really not a rich country. We just have a bunch of ultra wealthy people who skew the numbers to make us look rich.
The average family in my state makes a combined income of about $60,000 USD/year.
I'm lucky that my wife is high up in state government and makes that much herself.
$60k USD and needs to give a lot of that to private companies, greedy and unregulated landlords, and quite often to the automotive industry just to barely survive. That or they go live somewhere cheap only to also not be paid well or even find a job at all and then get trapped because they don’t have the money to leave.
Yeah, even at that level we are still living paycheck to paycheck, with no money left to put into savings.
Insurance companies can own clinics. Not in the traditional sense but via contract law they control how the clinic is allowed to interact with you, the insurance companies beneficiaries.
There are non disclosure agreements around this because the insurance company doesn't want you to know. Other insurance company's already know because its their fucking industry. They are hiding these contracts from us. The affected party.
Insurance is the real fraud
In the US we literally spend twice as much per capita on healthcare as the rest of the developed world, while having the worst quality of healthcare in the developed world. That extra money all goes to the insurance companies. Muigi Langione is all I can say.
Private for-profit insurance that is.
State-run public health insurance is pretty freaking awesome.
No, yes, yes, no.
thisisfine.webm
Ah, we're using webm instead of PNG now?
Insurance would most likely decrease the probability of going bankrupt?
~~Middlemen~~ Insurance companies run our entire for-profit healthcare system in the US. You have to pay your "deductible" first before they'll pay anything significant, which could be thousands of dollars. Every year. Entire families are bankrupted every year, even with health insurance. They have us over a barrel...
Yeah, but also have you seen the bill reduction that comes when you don't have insurance. Suddenly it's only $7000 to fix your broken leg instead of $173000. It's like magic
The $70 Advil still kills me and it’s probably gone up since I learned about it. It’s all just a big open-air scam and most of the fuckheads in that country think doing anything about it is a bad thing.
They seem to want this, and I don’t know how to help them if that’s the case.
Don't have incentive to check if this is an realistic example since I live in Europe but that sounds bad. In e.g. Sweden, health care costs caps at ~$100 a year. America is supposedly richer than Sweden, should be no problem fixing this in that case
as a fellow swede, i have learned that you simply have to accept that america is so terrible that it's not something we can really grasp, we've been told for so long that america is at least okay to live in and it's just not true at all and it's very difficult to break through that cognitive dissonance.
There's a reason every American except the upper class was cheering for Luigi. It's not even a new phenomenon, ACA (Obamacare) was supposed to lighten the load on the working class.
Before Obama, my parents had Blue Cross Blue Shield who pre-approved a procedure. My parents still had to pay $250k out of pocket for a life-saving skeletal surgery for my little brother, after the insurance "paid" their part
And Blue Cross Blue Shield are one of the better ones :/
Lmao. I just paid 500 for two wisdom teeth to be removed. Insurance was pre-approved, but dr. Is submitting it incorrectly, so they called me expecting a CC to cover the remaining 1900. I emailed them the same instructions on submission that my insurance company sent to them and asked them if they had done that first. We were PRE-APPROVED because while I switched insurance companies this year to ensure we would have oral surgery providers in-network, apparently the insurance website wasn't accurate and nobody is in network.
That fucking sucks. I'm sorry
Well ...
For my wife's PT, I received a recent bill of $5300. Insurance reduced to $1100. I owed the copay.
That said, just for PT for my wife, I'm past your cap every month of the year, and I pay extra for the coverage I have.
Yeah its bad.
Yep, and that's just the copays for actually using the insurance. That doesn't even count the monthly cost of insurance even if you do nothing. I've spent years never using mine because I couldn't afford anyrhing beyond perhaps the basic copay for a visit.
Oh definitely.
I have good coverage provided by work for me only, which wouldn't cost me anything, and is not common for people.
Add my family at the base and its good, but now a few hundred a month.
Add them to a level thats appropriate (considering kids, meds I need, stuff my wife needs, etc) and its an order of magnitude more expensive, but comes out cheaper than out of pocket for just those bits.
Its horrendous.