yukinojou:

The US disaster with ACA/Obamacare repeal got me curious about comparison of healthcare costs and I’m… slightly stunned.

I went private with my recent surgery, not supported by government funds or insurance. I paid circa $2,000 total for top-notch surgery, over a dozen blood tests and all other related tests, general anaesthesia, 2 nights’ stay in private hospital with premium care and food and all the nice painkillers etc – and that includes all post-op care, which will be at least four visits plus two ultrasounds. (In Poland I could have had it all for free, but it’d involve waiting a few months to a year plus a lot less pampering.)

In the UK doing it private looks to be around 5,000 GBP, which seems reasonable-ish considering higher wages and cost of living, plus it being a premium product since the NHS has shorter wait times than our NFZ.

In the US? Nearly $15,000 O.o Which is the annual salary for full-time work at the federal minimum wage. And that’s a study from 2008, so it’s bound to be higher now. So the choice for a poor person with this condition is somehow get an amount of money equal to her annual wages, or slowly bleed out and die.

Fingers very crossed the US gets its act together soon enough not to have people die from preventable lack of healthcare, but I’m not having my hopes up.

Here’s the thing – it’s too late on that hope. That’s what we’ve been saying. We’re dying over here. We’re dying from things that are fully preventable and it’s all because of the fucking plutocracy we live under. We’re dying, and there’s jack fucking shit we can do about it, because the people that make all the decisions refuse to fucking listen to us, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse. We’re headed right straight for another French revolution and they don’t seem to see it coming and personally, I have no desire to have to live through that, so anyone that wants to invade and sort out our shit for us since we can’t apparently do it ourselves is welcome to get cracking.