Well, no upside except for a few conspicuous exceptions.
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Can you smell that, people? That is the sweet smell of FREEDOM. Yes, when this fine lady left the hospital, sure, she left with a hefty bill for minimal services, services that she riskily curtailed in the expectation that the bill would be even more than it was. But it was her bill. She was making her own decisions. There was no DC bureaucrat deciding that she could freeload on the American people and have superior services for which she had not paid for, nor was she entitled. She left with her hefty bill. But I’ll tell you what else she left with (besides a scarred, untreated ear lobe). She left with her DIGNITY.
The preceding was sarcasm and does not represent the view of the author, boingboing.net, or Happy Mutants, LLC.
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I’m struggling to put into words how alien it is for me to even consider this possibility. Any way I put it, I don’t have any hopes of conveying how alien it is for someone who lives in Mexico to consider that you might go into a hospital with an injury like this and then decide that it would be financially ruinous to have a doctor tell you if you can even afford to keep your ear.
I have no way to reconcile these facts with any semblance of a sensible world to live in.
OK then, 300 dollars for the bandage, 300 dollars for the ice pack and 5151 dollars for checking her blood pressure, pupils and lucidity.
Madness.
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$14 per aspirin tablet… in 1982.
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Your forgot the upside! MASSIVE PROFITS!!! 
Every day, in every way, I become less and less likely to risk a trip to the USA.
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When I was frequently working in freezers, the skin on my fingers would crack and split open (never quite bone deep, though). Like many working class people, I carried a tube of superglue in my pocket for mission critical first-aid. It worked as well as anything modern medicine can do.
I seriously need dental work done soon. So does my wife. I recently found out that my daughter does as well. For any single one of us to get it done at our local dentist (who we like) would cost a multiple of our savings (despite having ‘good’ insurance). If we don’t though, quite soon we’ll all be limited to foods that don’t require chewing.
We’ve started shopping. It appears that we could all go traveling, have a nice family vacation in Costa Rica, do some sightseeing and stay at a nice hotel, and get all the necessary work done for all three of us, for less than the cost of a single one of us getting the work done here.
That’s going to be difficult to plan, and still very difficult to afford, but yet it’s still a lucky case. You can’t do that in an emergency.
To make matters worse, in a non-emergency medical case, it can take weeks or months to get an appointment with an appropriate doctor. Until fairly recently, that meant that you often had to go to the emergency room for just about anything (at least anything that might possibly get progressively worse), and pay the x100 emergency room fees. Thankfully the last decade or so has seen the rise of ‘urgent care facilities’, which are basically just doctors that don’t require you to plan and schedule when you’re going to get sick or injured several months in advance.
There’s only one bright side to the U.S. healthcare system - if your treatment doesn’t require payment up front and if you ignore the debt long enough, it eventually falls out of the statute of limitations. So if you can stay healthy for at least 7 years or so, eventually you can rebuild your credit.
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It’s sickening isn’t it?
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Of course in the bizzaro world that is US healthcare policy, insurance companies point to cases like these and say “See, only we stand between you and this sort of horror and economic disaster.”
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Vermont is wonderful. Ever been there?
What? She was insured.
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I would move there in a heartbeat if not for… reasons
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Like having an actual job there? That’s why I left… I was employed, jobbed up as it were. But I saw the wall in terms of salary. Great place to live. No upward mobility. Had to leave. I’m making now, after only a few years away, more than twice what I made there, doing similar work. Go figure? Well, it doesn’t figure well in dear old Vermont. Love the place, though, and miss it.
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To my mind, even if socialized medical care was more expensive it would still be worth it. Keeping the entire human herd healthy is it’s own reward.
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