A Boring Dystopia

My Son broke his arm (type 3 fracture) last week. We went to our local ER and were seen immediately. We ended up spending 3 nights in hospital and having multiple surgeries to pin and correct the break. He's on a 6 week care plan with scheduled appointments with a specialist team.

Want to guess how much it cost us? $0 (or 1.5% bracketed tax of my income per year) b-b-but that's socialism!!

No we don't have fancy private health insurance, we just live in a country that doesn't punish it's citizens for being poor.

The USA needs a revolution.

My first child has a genetic disorder. We had to spend 4 months in hospital during the first year and just one medication the kid has to take costs ~€250k per year.

For the hospital stay we paid a total of €0.

The medication costs ~€7 per pack and is capped to 2% of my yearly income.

Apparently not letting kids die from treatable conditions is socialism though.

the hospital went to court to garnish 35% of her wages. She works at McDonalds.

Not that I question the unsourced anecdotes of the God account, but I'd be genuinely curious to see a business that thought an astronomical legal bill would be worth garnishing the wages of a service sector worker.

As someone with family in the legal profession and the medical billing profession, it's crazy to think of the cost-benefit of pursuing this kind of claim given the return expected. Hospitals write off millions a year in "bad debt", because collection is consistently more expensive than the real value of these claims.

Hol' up: You guys even have to pay for medical treatment for your kids? What kind of fucky shit have you got going on over there. Stop that.

Why aren’t people having families? It must be the porn and the queers. That’s the only possible explanation. Yessiree.

Similarly, if you're accused of a crime and you're poor, you might not be able to afford bail money, so you'll be stuck in jail and you'll inevitably lose your job, ruining your life, regardless of whether you're guilty or innocent.

Meanwhile if you're rich and an Epstein co-conspirator pedophile who raped and sex trafficked children, the government won't even arrest you.

And homelessness is illegal now so I’m sure the system will inevitably end up imprisoning her and forcing her to preform slave labor in a for profit prison and she will have her children taken away and placed into a system that will abuse and exploit them until they age out and end up in the for profit prison system as 80% of foster youth do The system is corrupt from top to bottom. Nothing will improve until the pedofile parasite class fears the masses

Whether you are a hardcore capitalist, or any other political ideology, I just don't understand how anybody can be against social policies.

In my country, people complain that our benefits system is crippling us. SOME people take advantage of our disabilities and childcare benefits, but it's a small price to pay for having them -- at the end of the day, if I had a disability which meant I could not work, my country would take care of me. For that, I am more than happy to pay more tax.

This extends to healthcare, childcare, education, etc. it's easy to sit and grumble when you see the tax bill every month, but god forbid you ever actually need these services. I am VERY happy I do not require disability benefits, and I am VERY happy that I pay into a system that makes this (and other services) available for those who do.

Everything else aside, why the fuck can they garnish 35% of a low income worker wage. If garnishing is a thing, there should be some kinds of means testing based on income that makes it a sliding scale that is substantially lower than 35% for a McDonalds worker.

"...might be taxed more."

Or taxed at all. If I dodged taxes the way these billionaire buttholes do, they would have already buried me UNDER the jail.

This is what I think truly turns people into law breakers, I won't say criminals. When the system works against you, why work with the system?

Low income people get pushed down so hard for trying. I'm am not at all surprised when they turn to illegal income to just try to have a little piece of what other people are born into.

All her children are learning that lesson. They are learning "No one is going to help you and the system is only there to hurt you."

One of my good friends about a decade ago had this very argument.

The right swore to everyone that hospitals can't turn you away, they have to treat you and if you can't pay for it they'll let you out of it.

I was working healthcare adjecent at the time, I'm telling him Fuck now, that's not how this works. It is a possible outcome.

If you walkin homeless, they might get you to the point where you're stable and set you free, but as soon as you have a kid there and you have to give them an ID and a name, your chances of being fucked go up 10x

In India we do have affordable public healthcare but 99% of it is so shit, corrupt, with pretty poor medical infrastructure, long waiting, unhygienic surroundings, poor security, poor air conditioning, and so on. So that one has to visit a private hospital or clinic to get treated. And most of the times they don’t accept public healthcare insurance coverage like ESI (Employee State Insurance) or Ayushaman-Bharat so you have to shell out extra out of your pocket to get a Private Health coverage plan. If you have a private plan, the private hospitals then submit invoices with higher fees to the insurer to mint more money from them thus reducing their cash to pay for other patients. The central government barely allocates any budget to healthcare and education.

I heard about a case from Bihar (one of the least developed states) where they constructed a public hospital for millions of dollars (which is very high thus some corrupt official or politician ate that money) only for it to be incomplete and abandoned.

I know a woman. She grew up with her mom, and her brother. When her brother was born, he had significant medical problems. (The father, being just about the worst POS to exist, reacted to news of his son's medical problems by finding himself a new girlfriend.) Since this happened in the US, the family had to sell their house and property, and this family grew up on the edge of homelessness as a result.

When this happens to one person it can affect generations. Healthcare more like what the rest of the world has could have allowed these people to be contributors to society (and taxes) instead of burdens to them.

Problem is, Money Obsessed Persons are often too stupid to understand any other concepts than money. They cannot understand cause and effect for anything that will happen more than three months from a given date. So the idea that helping a child now equals a taxpayer in the future is not something they are able to understand.

What the hell country is this in? Aren't ER visits free?

don't forget about the random people kidnapped or murdered by thugs but the thugs say they deserve it because after they murdered and kinapped a bit one of um kicked their car.