I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone. Even though it may take a while for specialists. I even get benefits for going to free appointments at the dentist. Safes money and pain later, leading to more productiveness as well.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂). Being in a hospital, receiving anything I needed just by showing my insurance card (for which I didn’t have to pay anything either as I was without a job at that point). And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks I’m more than glad to pay that back.
The US just weirds me the fuck out. I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
What’s worse is that millions of people actually find the idea of paying a dime for anyone else’s healthcare disgusting. And we don’t even get to have a super low tax rate. We just spend our tax money on murdering children across the globe instead of caring for our own. Millions of us see it and oppose it but our society is just sick enough with enough asshole republicans gaming the system in a way that keeps us from doing a fucking thing about it. I wish we were as civilized as nations like Germany.
More than once, I hear an ad on the radio about good Christians coming together to help pay each other’s medical bills and think to myself that is the very thing they hate so much.
But they get to choose whose medical bills get paid. They can make sure that only “good Christians deserving of Jesus’ mercy” are the ones getting assistance. Not some stranger in the urban ghettos with children born out of wedlock, etc.
These are the people that will make the distinction between “drug addict” and “person with substance use disorder” based on demographics like race, socioeconomic status, and religion.
Neoliberals are also in on it too, not just republicans. And that’s our system. It’s all fucked top to bottom.
I knew someone would say something like this. But it’s not the same. I’ve discussed this a million times. If you’re willing to admit Republicans are many, many times worse then maybe we can talk. If you’re going to erase the difference then it’s a no-go from me
It’s all manipulation, Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly. In general, unless you’re talking about bigotry and deep-seated prejudice, most of the dumb stuff Americans believe, we have been essentially force fed.
In this case, for historical reasons I don’t remember ATM, it became normalized for employers to offer health insurance and for that to be the primary way people obtained health insurance. Combine that with the strategy to teach poor white people to hate on minorities, as a way to feel superior to someone and thus less angry about their own lot, and you can start to see how the link between employment and healthcare can be seen by some as a moral situation - the person without the good job to get the healthcare must be lazy, and since we don’t want to encourage laziness, it’s therefore acceptable (even preferred!) not to take care of them.
I can’t stress enough how much effort is put into teaching a huge portion of America to fear and hate, constantly. We wouldn’t be this bad otherwise, we’re pretty normal folks by and large. Even pretty kind and generous, often. We’ve just been really fucked up, and very deliberately.
It was during the Great Depression and WWII that employer-provided health insurance took off. The fed instituted a wage freeze to combat inflation in the 40s, and as a result, employers had to start offering other incentives like health insurance to attract/retain their workforce.
FDR wanted to pass universal healthcare (along with a lot of other progressive policies) under his Second Bill of Rights, but it never came to be. Had his ideas been enshrined in law, we’d have universal healthcare, a minimum livable wage, adequate housing, the right to work, and several others.
Thanks, I vaguely remembered it being related to WWII and being intended as a temporary stopgap measure due to having few other options, it being a rough time…but I didn’t remember the details well enough to cite like that. We ought to make this a bit of common knowledge, truly!
Entire organizations (insurance companies) who do not facilitate health and well-being in any significant way at all - and often impede it, with real commitment! - profit massively from this dysfunction, while both patients AND caregivers suffer mightily, to feed the parasite.
That combined with the fact that the “health insurance via employment” system was set up as essentially a crisis response which should never have been maintained…just really needs to be hammered home.
Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it’s tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for “self reliance” that has IMO been corrupted into “You’re on your own, sucker. Got mine.” instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as “picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps” these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well…ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one’s life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it’s your fault if you’re not self-reliant, and people have decided that it’s better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
I have very little to disagree with here, and I somewhat accept your premise that we’re being driven to be the thing we’re behaving as. I mean, that’d just be “fake it til you make it” in a particularly gross context.
However - I’ve drank beers (and bad shots, why not) around exactly the kinda folks you’d expect to find in some of the diviest bars in parts of rural America that barely (or don’t) have a grocery store. Some of those folks are irredeemable, don’t get me wrong. A whole lot of them, though, are truly decent folks who’ve been completely misled.
That was a work thing that I hated and left behind some years ago, but I know very personally two current Trump voters. If you reduce those 2 people to a ballot, pretty easy to condemn them. If you know them the way I do, it’s just blatantly obvious they have no idea who and what they voted for. They were fooled, conned, by a known successful conman. It’s really that simple.
Edit: redundancy
That’s not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain’t as bad as they’re being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we’re properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It’s hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of “human bad, human needs to be controlled” was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like “Lord of the Flies”.
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain’t inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It’s the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
Yes but also the brainwashing wouldn’t be effective if Americans didn’t eat it up, which they do. It takes two to tango and the population here is really ignorant on many fronts, and that’s not just the media or government’s fault.
And arguing that Americans aren’t really psycho doesn’t work that well especially with the elections and their beliefs in general. Americans seem the most psycho to me, but hey I just live here.
I really don’t think Americans have some unique makeup that makes us different, we’re all just humans. What’s different in America is the effort spent and the success achieved in manipulating our population to be hateful and scared.
I do take your point though, we are still culpable. It does take two to tango.
And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks
By “complete dicks” you mean people like Friedrich Merz?
Even here, “cosmetic” dental work can be pricey. IIRC, my braces were covered by insurance, but the retainer wire after that had to be paid up front by my parents with some kind of “insurance will pay back 80% of it after ten years” clause. One has fully broken off and should have long been replaced, the other broke partially and should be replaced too, but I don’t really have the money to drop 600 on that right now if I don’t know how much I’ll get back.
I’m super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone.
Stimmt so aber nicht ganz. Die meisten Leute glauben bei uns wäre die Krankenversicherung verpflichtend, aber nicht jeder Staatsbürger ist krankenversichert.
Shit, das Problem habe ich tatsächlich übersehen. 🫣
Zumindestens ist das Problem auch als solches deklariert, da müsste definitiv nachgebessert werden. Ich würde jedoch behaupten das, im Vergleich zur USA, hier die Ausnahme die Regel bestätigt. Rein rechtlich hat hier jeder Krankenversicherungsschutz, es müssen “nur” diese Löcher gestopft werden durch die manche Menschen fallen.
I’m Italian and here public healthcare gets worse every day, thanks to continuous budget cuts and political incompetence. Nowadays if you want get blood tests in my region you have to wait months, or go through insurance, usually provided by… Your employer. Fuck them all.
I’m sorry to hear that… I expected something like this the moment the fascists won though. As far as I know you also lost social security (as in money for the jobless), right?
We probably have this in our future as well. Despite our government generally doing a good job (despite & except the neoliberal dick who once was our finance minister and just got fired) in this last legislature, far-right media propaganda is simply overwhelming. A christo-fascist outcome isn’t too unlikely next time. 😔 It will wreak havoc on everything.
Yeah no the fascists don’t have anything to do with this, or better, they’re just the last of a list of legislatures going back to the 90s who kept cutting the public services’ budgets, with a big upturn after the 2008 subprime crisis.
No we haven’t lost unemployment pay, they removed, for better or for worse, what the previous government instituted and labelled as “universal basic income”, which in the end took the form of a more generous unemployment pay, but we still have the standard one.
The truth is there’s actually very little difference between “left” and “right” governments nowadays: 10 years ago Renzi, with an allegedly left-wing government, actuated the biggest removal of workers right in recent history… They’re all rich kids anyway, all they care about is taking more and more money from the general populace.
It’s not even selfish. It bites the people who fight for it in a thousand different ways.
It’s just silly. If they were any good at being selfish, they’d want people to have healthcare, because everybody else’s shit makes your world better or worse regardless of your money or whether you acknowledge it.
I’m an American immigrant in Germany, and solidarity is exactly the word I’ve been using to describe the difference between the cultures. I work in a bakery part-time (as a salesperson) while studying, and it’s very different working in customer service in Germany from how it is in the US, because people here see you as a part of society in a way they don’t there.
I don’t get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
It’s because the US is far too big. People in one part of it have a very different culture to people in a different part of it, as a result they find it hard to empathize with them because their lives are so completely different. The problem is that they are all one country and operate under one government.
The individual state governments help a little bit (except when they’re trying to write laws to one-up each other), but basically the US government is trying to implement laws that will apply across wildly different cultural ideologies.
From the highly religious almost zealot south (Texas, Florida), to the mostly secular north east (Washington), to the liberal west (California), to the farming belt in the Central regions.
Even if I did go to a doctor, it might be because most insurance covers seeing a doctor but not dental shit.
It’s sad. They’re not just luxury bones in the US either. National healthcare here in Estonia only covers dental until you turn 19 and then all you get is a tiny annual benefit, rest is out of pocket. I believe that most countries don’t give adults dental coverage :/
Essentially the health board is completely fine paying for cancer treatments, broken bones, or to have a suspicious mole removed. They’ll subsidize prescription medication. But TEETH!!! WHO NEEDS THOSE???
It’s such a stumble of history that teeth were historically associated with barbers and not doctors, causing the dental practice industry to evolve separately from all other medical practices. Bullshit how a vestige of that lives on today in dental insurance coverage being its own special snowflake thing.
Judgmental bitch. Dental insurance coverage is so much worse than medical it’s can be basically non existent
Privilege is blinding. The dentist can’t fathom how a “normal” person they are speaking to couldn’t afford to go to a dentist. It doesn’t even register. The dentist then must assume it was pure laziness or apathy.
A lot of Dentist retire by 50. They are not exactly wage slaves but I get what you are saying.
It is laziness or apathy. If for 30 years you were unable to spare $100 for a single checkup, then you are either sick or suck at managing money. And if you still can’t afford that for 30 years, there are organisations that will do it for free - you just need to reach out to them.
Being unable to put aside $100 for a year, year and a half - sure. Being unable to put aside $100 for thirty years? Yeah, nah.
It’s not the cost of the checkup I worried about. It was the cost of fixing any problems they find. At that point why bother getting the checkup if I can’t afford that?
Nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/), and lots of those struggle to cover their standard expenses. Getting your teeth checked doesn’t help you stay in paying work. If you manage to save a few hundred you’re probably going to spend it on that house or car repair that you’ve been needing for months, or some new clothes for your kids.
In addition to the other reasons, there is also the worry of surprise charges. You’ll go in for a $100 checkup, only to find a bunch of other “standard” fees and services tacked on at the end. They’ll act like this is normal, and you’re weird for asking how much it costs up front.
This is twice as bad at the doctor than at the dentist.
I HAVE dental insurance, NO ONE FUCKING ACCEPTS IT.
The “in-network” thing is anyoing. As long as the place has a license and hasn’t been a issue, they should be “in-network”.
Having insurance tied to a job doesn’t help either. if you/family member needs specialist care, so you find a fantastic doctor, but oops your job changed insurance provider and now your doc is out of network.
Complaints aside, if you’re actually having trouble finding a dentist; go to your insurance’s website, they probably have a “find a dentist” tool or something.
I hear you. The challenge is what the insurer is willing to pay for the services the dentist provides. At the end of the day, the deal is “we are bringing more patients to you by being in our network, so you’ll take less money for your services in exchange.” And sometimes the numbers just don’t make sense for the doctor to accept.
This is why dentists in the US decided to not make themselves part of the same system as other medical doctors-- The ADA vs AMA. They get to make their own rules and more importantly, deals to get paid.
And full cash money rules over whatever any insurance company decides to pay you.
Insurance companies designed their policies to maximize profit over patient care. Dentists said fuck that racket
