Bankruptcy due to personal medical bills – a thing that I never heard about behind the Iron Curtain.
Tethyssays
No idea what Biden is on about. It’s not 1950 and there is zero reason to continue the embargo. From all reports, Cuba is the model for recycling and pristine environments.
America should be emulating them, not continuing the utter failure of the Cold War policy.
When I coordinated an international youth project in Cuba, one of our group needed to have his appendix removed in emergency surgery. Of course we’d taken out travel health insurance that would reimburse us, but we had to put out the money first. Our Cuban hosts were shocked to hear that we had to pay 1.000 $ for the whole thing and we needed to reassure them that really, it was fine. The idea of paying for treatment was alien to them (we also needed lots of smaller medical help for which they never charged us, including your truly who had an infected mosquito bite)
jrkrideausays
@ 1 Charly
In Canada, people visiting the hospital complain bitterly about the cost of car parking.
I was hospitalized for over a month a couple of years ago after a bad accident. For some bizarre reason I had to pay $45 for the ambulance but, because they asked me to leave a day early which messed up my transport arrangements they paid for my taxi home.
I was recently reminded that as a teen in France without my family, I was treated by a doctor for persistent ear pain without any payment at all. (I was staying with the family of the teen who had stayed with my family as a foreign exchange student.) If things had been to the point of surgery or something, I don’t think that would have remained true, but for an ear infection I couldn’t shake the doctor saw me & helped & sent me on without taking a franc.
lumipunasays
In Finland you get small co-payment bills from using public healthcare services. Recently, it was noted in the news that these bills go surprisingly often into debt collection, which obviously suggests that healthcare isn’t as free as it should be. The amounts in collection are typically just hundreds of euros – it’d be difficult to accumulate much more than that. I’m not sure how the debt collection thing practically affects poor people (who may also have other debts in collection).
They say nobody here (in Europe) goes broke from healthcare bills. I think that’s only true in American sense, in that nobody goes *dramatically* broke from healthcare bills. Also, I think having previous unpaid bills won’t prevent you from accessing healthcare (unlike, say, being undocumented).
Bankruptcy due to personal medical bills – a thing that I never heard about behind the Iron Curtain.
No idea what Biden is on about. It’s not 1950 and there is zero reason to continue the embargo. From all reports, Cuba is the model for recycling and pristine environments.
America should be emulating them, not continuing the utter failure of the Cold War policy.
When I coordinated an international youth project in Cuba, one of our group needed to have his appendix removed in emergency surgery. Of course we’d taken out travel health insurance that would reimburse us, but we had to put out the money first. Our Cuban hosts were shocked to hear that we had to pay 1.000 $ for the whole thing and we needed to reassure them that really, it was fine. The idea of paying for treatment was alien to them (we also needed lots of smaller medical help for which they never charged us, including your truly who had an infected mosquito bite)
@ 1 Charly
In Canada, people visiting the hospital complain bitterly about the cost of car parking.
I was hospitalized for over a month a couple of years ago after a bad accident. For some bizarre reason I had to pay $45 for the ambulance but, because they asked me to leave a day early which messed up my transport arrangements they paid for my taxi home.
@Giliell
I was recently reminded that as a teen in France without my family, I was treated by a doctor for persistent ear pain without any payment at all. (I was staying with the family of the teen who had stayed with my family as a foreign exchange student.) If things had been to the point of surgery or something, I don’t think that would have remained true, but for an ear infection I couldn’t shake the doctor saw me & helped & sent me on without taking a franc.
In Finland you get small co-payment bills from using public healthcare services. Recently, it was noted in the news that these bills go surprisingly often into debt collection, which obviously suggests that healthcare isn’t as free as it should be. The amounts in collection are typically just hundreds of euros – it’d be difficult to accumulate much more than that. I’m not sure how the debt collection thing practically affects poor people (who may also have other debts in collection).
They say nobody here (in Europe) goes broke from healthcare bills. I think that’s only true in American sense, in that nobody goes *dramatically* broke from healthcare bills. Also, I think having previous unpaid bills won’t prevent you from accessing healthcare (unlike, say, being undocumented).