So, I just read
this: "How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylist's."
And it makes me feel a kind of sick horror. Even though it's
not my risk. I don't live in America - I live in Australia, where my private health insurance (which I have even though I've been unemployed for a couple of years now, because it never had anything to do with employment) doesn't actually cost me that much, and where, if I didn't have it, I would still be able to get necessary medical treatment, because that's what Medicare is for. And Medicare applies to everybody.
My private health insurance, as a young, single adult, costs me about $40 a month.
Some time in the nearish future I'm going to be getting an MRI. My psychologist, having heard my history of severe head injury, and recognising that some of my problems may, in fact, be due to frontal lobe damage (which I'm trying not to find terrifying or horrifying, because if I have frontal lobe damage, I've had it for nearly twenty years), wants me to get one. (And is surprised I haven't had one before.)
Is this urgent? No. The head injury provoking this curiosity about the physical condition of my brain happened in about 1990.
Is it critically necessary? Not really. It would be useful information, but my health and survival don't really ride on it.
But I'll get it done anyway, and it will be covered by Medicare, just, you know, in case.
All sorts of screening and testing procedures are covered by Medicare, because it costs less money to prevent disease than treat it, as a rule. And because, in Australia, universal health care is considered a fundamental right of citizens.
In the last month and a half I've been to the Emergency Department about four times, for various reasons. I have paid exactly nothing for the treatment I received there, even when I had to get stitches, even when the doctor gave me antibiotics.
I have medications. Every month, I get my antidepressants and my dexamphetamines. A few days ago I got antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection as well. The antidepressants and dexamphetamines cost me around $30 each. The antibiotics cost me about $20. I can get them at whatever pharmacy is most convenient. The process goes like this: 1) walk into pharmacy 2) hand over prescription 3) wait 5-10 minutes 4) pay 5) leave, with medication in hand.
When I need to see a doctor, I see the doctor I want to see. Some people see different doctors every time, some people see different doctors for different things, which is weird to me. I used to see the doctor I'd seen since early childhood, now I see the doctor I prefer at the university medical centre.
My old family doctor, at the point when I switched, was the most expensive he'd ever been, as he'd moved to a new practice. Out of pocket, I was paying about $20 a visit. (Medicare was paying most but not all.) My new doctor I don't actually pay anything at all to see. The university practice bulk-bills students, which means Medicare pays for all of it. I go in, get seen, sign a form, leave.
I don't have to worry about who takes my insurance. In situations where I have actually made use of my private health insurance, I still went where I wanted to go, and my insurance paid - coverage is based on the service rendered, not the provider who rendered it.
I've always taken all this stuff for granted. It's how the health system works, and in Australia we still complain that it's not really good enough. If you need non-urgent medical treatment you have to wait for it, in a queue behind the urgent people, and the non-urgent people who've been waiting longer. (Private cover involves less waiting, it's true.)
I just can't understand how a modern, developed economy like America's is still labouring with such a broken system, one that kills people and leaves them struggling to survive if they manage to escape alive, and its politicians can still make analogies to countries like Sweden that make it sound like socialised medicine is a
bad thing. I read about the debates in magazines like the
New Yorker and it just deeply, profoundly does not make sense to me.
