Nonsense. There are many ways to get free or reduced price medical care in the US, especially if you are poor. Your doctor will have resources to help you if needed.
You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it. The hospital will sell your debt to bill collectors who will call you for a while, and eventually sue you. At that point you can offer to settle for pennies on the dollar, or you might lose the lawsuit and have to declare bankruptcy which would mean you have negative credit for a few years.
Obviously it will be a difficult time, and hopefully you have something else, but they won't just let you die because you can't afford it.
> There are many ways to get free or reduced price medical care in the US, especially if you are poor.
"In the US" here is a bit misleading because it conflates places where the poor have reliable access to needed healthcare with the places they do not.
> Your doctor will have resources to help you if needed.
This seems presumptuous. More so because we just discussed this and he does not. To be fair, it was expected.
> You can also rack up huge medical debt and then not pay it.
This is a simple declarative statement in the face of a complex issue. It does not (and can not) meaningfully address the required nuances. For example that the medicaid isn't available (red state), that surgery is beyond the scope of the sole social provider (Good Samaritan) or persuading any one of our (rural for-profit) hospitals that non-urgent oncological care should be provided due to EMTALA.
And thru 25yrs of care giving my disabled spouse and 15yrs servicing the medical community, I've learned a bit about what is and isn't available in this place.
Also if you have a low paying job its probably not a big loss to quit it and go on Medicaid if you have a six or seven figure illness. Though it seems like they are trying to change this path for 2027.
If someone is dying of colorectal cancer, trying to get them to worry about their credit score is not only not helpful, it's actively harmful. Messing up your credit for a few years is in the category of "inconvenience" and it's not the kind of thing that you need to worry about when surviving cancer.
> It was only the ones that voted themselves infinite wealth and got it,
It was also the ones who spent generations pressuring their govs for ever restrictive zoning laws, wanting to freeze their neighborhood in time by tanking new builds. This is very much pulling up the ladder behind them.
I've seen your observation be confirmed in other places besides California sometimes, so I think it's 100% a problem, I just don't know much about it or how widespread it is across the country.
There's probably 1000 other cuts that things are dying from which all add up.
If this is the biggest problem holding back the prosperity locally where development was already difficult, there's probably something equivalent in the rural communities where it's not so crowded.
When opportunity all recedes at once nationwide, it's got to be due to the sucking sound coming from Washington more than any one local area I would think :)
I've never seen that in action but it seems as corrupt and unfair as lots of other things that contributed to the snowballing lack of future opportunity in different ways. Very much pulling up the ladder like you have seen first hand, however the well-connected ones could pull it off they were getting it while the getting was good. With very limited oportunities to get on the gravy train as always, the remaining younger boomers never had a chance :(
In places like Texas and Florida it seems like development never stops for anything.
I have two particularly notorious Seagate periods:
Seagate bought Conner when Conner had released several models w/
leaky seals. Bad sectors started at the outer edge of the
platters and grew inward. We had a lot of these drives
out there and Seagate refused to honor Conner's drive
warranties.
The 7200.10 series had super high failure rates. I wound up
replacing every one in my care, within 2 years. The 7200.11
drives weren't much better.
I think the last Seagate lines I truly trusted were the ST series of MFM and RLL drives.
> Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10%
Our family learned how long-term hunger (via poverty) is worse in the US because there was no social support network we could tap into (for resource sharing).
Families not in crisis don't need a network. Families in crisis have insufficient resources to launch one. They are widely scattered and their days are consumed with trying to scrape up rent (then transpo, then utilities, then food - in that order).
In this, I'm in the same boat as millions of other Americans. Positive medical news rarely applies to us.
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