monanotlisa:

thebibliosphere:

lizardtitties:

withasmoothroundstone:

robstmartin:

titleknown:

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

This explains a lot.  And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce.  Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.  

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that.  Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid.  Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given.  It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

Eat the rich. Resist.

I’m still boggled by how incredibly expensive utterly ridiculous procedures are: an ultrasound; an x-ray. Sure, the machinery is expensive.

But given the base model for an x-ray machine in Germany costs about 40,000 EUR, and one (1) x-ray in the United States costs 4,000 USD without insurance, something is Very Wrong here in the US. Amortization is a thing…but not in ten  (10) or so uses, as a general rule.

Ultrasound examinations here in the US are almost impossible to obtain, and likewise costs a lot of money. In Germany, many doctors have them in their practices, right there. They cost about 2,500 EUR for base models in black and white, and from 9,000 EUR for the fancy ones on rollers with nice screens and several functionalities. They save lives, too, like my sister’s – whose ruptured appendix was diagnosed just in time. How they are Mystical Equipment at Special Clinics that you need to be Sent To For Only The Worst Cases is a travesty.