It’s apples and oranges. There are antimalarial drugs, there’s a vaccine against yellow fever (I got vaccinated before going to Africa and I could barely make it home from the doctor’s office - I can’t even imagine the disease itself) and from what I saw in Asia, locals are pretty paranoid about unattended clean water sources and surfaces where mosquitos transmitting dengue fever reproduce.
That’s what bothers me with the “it is what it is” crowd - this fake fatalism about “living with the virus” which was conspicuously absent in the last 150 years of medical advancements.
I’m talking about since the beginning of COVID altogether, and as time goes by you can also expect trends to change. A whole bunch of people died in Canada in March and April, now very few are dying. The situation has stabilized more or less, while in the US it has not.
You can get good doctors in poor countries too if you have enough money.
The point is that there are endemic diseases in other places and people continue with their lives while taking some precautions, it’s not the end of the world as we know it as many people have claimed.
Yeah, so once more is known about dealing with COVID it could very well be much less of a threat than mosquito-borne diseases.
All I’m saying is that there might be no choice but to continue living as we always have and just accept the threat of COVID, just like how people deal with these sort of diseases.
From what I hear, you have to be rich or have a job that offers health insurance to get decent medical care in the US. Some of the highest medical costs in the world, and drug prices too.
You hear wrong. If you want to walk in and see a doc for an ear infection, cold, shoulder ache, whatever, you can do it perfectly affordably on a cash basis if you’re not up to your eyeballs in debt.
Now, if you stay at a hospital yeah your bill is going to be eye popping. Surgery on a cash basis? Yeah way expensive. But I can go to urgent care or my primary care doctor for like 20-50 bucks. That’s hardly life ending if you’re middle class.
Drugs for every day things aren’t killer although they are high absolutely. Some of the others though are very crazy cost wise. No argument on costs.
But the impression that you can’t see a doctor for a normal thing without going bankrupt is wrong.
Hey, I have never been to a doctor in the US so I can’t speak from experience, but my impression of US health care is that unless you are rich or have insurance it’s not much different from many third world countries. And if you end up in a hospital you might come out wishing you had died instead because you will be drowning in debt for the rest of your life.
Which is EXACTLY why I responded the way I did. It’s not. Not even freaking close. In any way.
This part may have an aspect of truth to it. I never said I liked where we were in HC. You’re new to the boards (comparatively speaking) so you have missed a lot of very long discussions on HC and “Obamacare” from before it was passed.
I don’t think I’m wrong though. Also, all those mosquito-borne illnesses make just about everyone infected extremely sick, unlike COVID which has a 50%+ asymptomatic rate. I already had COVID, and I would much rather get it again than malaria, dengue, or yellow fever.
Yeah and I’d rather have Covid than anal cancer and a host of other things. I’m not trying to argue that Covid is the worst possible thing to get. But comparing it to mosquito borne illnesses doesn’t make much sense still which loppar and I have already pointed out. We could continue to beat up the point but I’m not sure why.
Unless we just want to say a bunch of obvious things like some things are worse than Covid and some things kill more than Covid but that’s just stating facts.
The fact is, that in the U.S. you have to be treated whether or not you can pay for it. Not everywhere, but if you cannot get there they will come in an bambulance and take you if you call. So technically we already have free medical care. You don’t get to pick your doctor, but you will get treatment. Most paramedic calls are for people with colds and flu. The safety net exists.
My biggest problems with proposed solutions so far is everybody is caught up in insurance coverage and the problem is cost. And insurance is the reason why the costs are so fucking high. If you can afford the doctor, you don’t need insurance. You would only need it for surgeries and emergencies, which would be much cheaper if you didn’t have to go through the insurance company for everything.