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This is by design. The government wants this for us.

I wonder if these adults will start voting for people interested in socialized medicine?

Shocking to who? Not shocking to us plebs living in this shithole.

#FreeLuigi

The shocking thing is the propaganda in the headline saying this is "shocking".

Where is the call for violent overthrow of the regime?

Its too expensive and most of the time you don't get any help.

The last few times I have gone to a doctor, its basically been shrugged shoulders and a bunch of surprise bills for the next few months.

Not adopting socialism is expensive.

I've probably needed PT for the past couple years. However, last time I went for an acute injury, it cost me $1200 in scans. The result was them saying there was nothing visibly wrong and it would probably clear up on its own in a couple of more weeks (they told me 4-6 weeks post injury and this was on week 3). So I essentially paid all that money for nothing.

I'm in the fortunate position that I can technically afford these kinds of expenses, but I still put off care because of the price. I completely understand why people in a worse position than me would absolutely not go to the doctor.

$30k in debt because I didn't feel like dying in June! Eagle screech

I just (last year) got a fantastic new job with great pay and benefits. Which means I am only responsible for the first 5000. It's been 12 years since I have seen a doctor. I'm in one of the worst health care states in the union. Just lucky so far. This is the state of healthcare in the usa.

Yeah but we can’t change it because republicans love dying

I find it so interesting when the centrists claim that universal healthcare is unaffordable. Cuz, uh, you know what's even less affordable? Whatever yalls have right now. And you know it, but fuck the facts.

I paid $400 for a 30 minute virtual visit where they asked me the same god damn questions I filled out on the intake form. Insurance covered 60% of that.

"Shocking"

Fuck you. Literally everyone in the US absolutely makes this decision for themselves and their families regularly. It isn't "shocking". It is the reality we're all dealing with.

What would be shocking is if anyone in charge gave a fuck about the people instead of their donors and moved to do something about it.

Super Mario Bros

It's worse than that. Doctors aren't as smart as you think they are. Not an insult but it takes years of having a patient to get a rough idea what's actually going on. Hard to do that when your insurance keeps changing every year.

Just read the stories about how things were in Britain when the National Health Service was created.

One of the things which was pretty common before the NHS was created was this kind of thing - most people would only ever go to the doctor when they were already very sick for a while and their health just kept getting worse.

After the National Health Service was created overall healthcare costs actually went down because people were actually going to the doctor much earlier and less sick, plus under Universal Healthcare "Preventive Medicine" makes sense even just from an economic point of view because it reduces the costs of the whole system.

You don't go to the doctor because it's too expensive.

I don't go to the doctor because I don't wanna find out what's wrong with my body.

We are not the same.

This seems right but… why are so many clinics still so backed up then?

And when you do go you feel like you're being rushed through the checkout lane and don't receive the help you actually need.

In America the only hope you have of receiving real medical care is being rushed into the ER actively in the process of dying. That's when you MIGHT get attended by a real medical professional that knows what they're doing and dedicates the time necessary to actually help you.

And then you spend the rest of your life paying for it.

It’s better for my credit rating if I just die.

I haven't seem a doctor since 2013. Ain't no way I could afford that bill. Thankfully I've had no major health complications or I'd be zeroed out and still probably owe money.

It's not shocking when you have no universal health care and even if you do have insurance it doesn't cover crap. I just paid $200 for labs because "insurance" only covered half the cost. The entire system is a racket.

I don't have insurance. I hope for the best until I have to visit an urgent care.

Yep, the insurance companies want us dead. They are trying to thin our those who are "weak" when it was thier fault that we are physically weak in the first place. They just want to kill people as far as I can tell. Helping is secondary.

We need healthcare to be cost prohibitive because there's not enough doctors or nurses to care for everyone.

Reasons for that likely because of the rising costs of tuition and the non-rising salaries, and complete forfeiture of your life during your bodies peak years.

It's all working as designed, because it's designed to keep us sick and in deep debt, perpetually afraid of the double-blow of getting sick and losing our jobs to keep us showing up to work every day. We are expendable cogs in a capitalist machine, and our lives have no value beyond what we can produce for the shareholders.

We have it only slightly better than dairy cows, in that we aren't literally getting fucked our entire career, and we get to keep living for a couple more years after we're no longer productive enough to keep working (if we were fortunate enough to save up for it).

And even at that...the cows at least get free healthcare, and food, and shelter provided for them. Most of them see more sunlight than most of us, too.

Best country in the world!

Oh wait...

Revolution is required

I mean I'm working at a fortune 500 company and with my stupid high deductible plan even I don't want to go unless it's something that pretty urgent. I mean I already pay 10K+ a year for my family and then it's another 10K to meet the deductible and every doctor's appointment that's not the annual checkup is two to three hundred dollars and urgent care is even more expensive so yeah, it's basically unless there's something absolutely wrong, it's avoid the doctor and only go when things are basically unbearable even knowing I could afford to go.

US heathcare is a joke and unpopular opinion but the ACA, aka, Federal Romneycare, needs to be ripped out and actual universal healthcare needs to be enacted.

The “92% of Americans aren’t going to the doctor because it’s too expensive” claim is misleading.

The 92% figure comes from a survey of just 1,507 U.S. adults conducted for financial-services company JG Wentworth. It reportedly found that 92% had delayed or abandoned some form of medical care because of cost. That is very different from saying that 92% of Americans don't go to the doctor, or that only 8% of Americans “attend to their health.”

There is much better independent data showing that cost really is a major problem, but the numbers are nowhere near 92%. KFF's 2025 national polling found that 36% of adults said they had skipped or postponed needed health care during the previous year because of cost. KFF also found that 37% of insured adults reported doing so, so having insurance clearly doesn't eliminate the problem.

Even better, an analysis using National Health Interview Survey data, rather than a private company's survey, found that about 17% of U.S. adults delayed or did not get health care because of cost in 2024.

So the underlying story is absolutely legitimate: healthcare costs are causing millions of Americans to delay or forgo care. But presenting a JG Wentworth survey's 92% figure as though it means “only 8% of Americans seek medical care” is a pretty substantial distortion of what the survey actually measured.

The more defensible takeaway is: American healthcare is expensive enough that a significant minority of Americans are delaying needed care because they cannot afford it. That's bad enough without turning the statistic into something it doesn't actually say.

How much of the remaining 8% aren’t going to the doctor because they can’t find one in network and the insurance company makes that basically impossible.