I’d like to know other non-US citizen’s opinions on your health care system are when you read a story like this. I know there are worse places in the world to receive health care, and better. What runs through your heads when you have a medical emergency?
A little background on my question:
My son was having trouble breathing after having a cold for a couple of days and we needed to stop and take the time to see if our insurance would be accepted at the closest emergency room so we didn’t end up with a huge bill (like 2000$-5000$). This was a pretty involved ~10 minute process of logging into our insurance carrier, and unsuccessfully finding the answer there. Then calling the hospital and having them tell us to look it up by scrolling through some links using the local search tool on their website. This gave me some serious pause, what if it was a real emergency, like the kind where you have no time to call and see if the closest hospital takes your insurance.
Some experience of the UK system, I’ve called for an ambulance twice in the UK recently for what I consider (and any reasonable person would) to be an emergency. Both times I was told it would be about 4 hours wait and could I get someone to drive me to the hospital. My partner has been phoning her GP to try and get an appointment for over two weeks and keeps getting told to phone back ‘in a few days’ because they have nothing available for over a month, including phone consultation. I’ve experienced dangerous ineptitude from multiple NHS doctors. I’ve also seen corruption in that if you know someone who works in the right department you can jump queues. So I’ve learned from experience to go private if I actually need medical aid.