Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss:

🇦🇺 0
🇨🇦 0
🇩🇰 0
🇫🇮 0
🇫🇷 0
🇩🇪 0
🇮🇸 0
🇮🇪 0
🇮🇹 0
🇯🇵 0
🇳🇱 0
🇳🇴 0
🇵🇹 0
🇪🇸 0
🇸🇪 0
🇬🇧 0
🇺🇸 530,000

There’s a lesson there.

@Strandjunker That seems low, I would have figured it to be much higher in the US.

Yeah, it’s crazy. I’ve done countless GoFundMe campaigns for friends and family to get medical care and lower the blow of medical debt later. Every time I do or see one, I think, this is so ridiculous 😳

@Strandjunker ya, I few weeks before moving from the US to France a driver hit me with their car while I was biking, then drove away leaving me unconscious in the road for 30 minutes before someone called ambulance.

I got a $38k hospital bill and I didn’t pay, I just moved to France.

@Strandjunker Been through medical bankruptcy.

@Strandjunker FUN FACT: Laws aren't copyrighted.

If another country has a good idea, you can borrow it and even modify it to make it better.

This problem has been solved many times. You don't need to start from scratch!

@Strandjunker This isn't true. People experience medical bankruptcy elsewhere too. It takes a year+ to get on disability. You have to pay for meds and therapy. Time off with salary is super important in the grand scheme of things.

You need a full social safety net for healthcare to be completely effective. Let's not set the targets low anywhere.

@Strandjunker Let me just throw this into perspective. Family member died while waiting treatment in EU country. This procedure would have been done in a day in US. However this particular EU country universal healthcare is so bad that they unfortunately died. I was livid. They will never go bankrupt due to healthcare because if its something serious they will end up dying anyhow.

@Strandjunker Many UK people lose their work due to illness (including managers who nose-mask only giving me covid that became first dose of long covid). I imagine some would go bankrupt because of that, but yes, far less than in the states

@Strandjunker You could also call it state-assisted suicide.

@Strandjunker And the reason at the root is empire. USA doesn’t produce enough, so it can’t stop borrowing in it’s own currency (to maintain fiscal & military dominance), and it can’t default in it because it’s the world reserve currency (that allows it to do so). So it keeps inflating it’s currency to devalue the old debt away. It’s been doing this since the 1970’s.

@Strandjunker

There's a lesson here.

I'm reminded of this quote from the movie Lord of War.

There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?

@x41h @Strandjunker that... that's terrible and I hate it, but US people would also die from lack of paying for treatment, whether they get it in a day or not (very often not even in weeks or months).
No one deserves this

@zed @Strandjunker XLNT.

I had appendicitis late last year. In hospital for maybe 14 hours incl. surgery.

$41,000 and change… fortunately I have medical insurance, but if I hadn’t? Debt or death, pick one.

@Strandjunker to be fair: in the Netherlands some people do get in financial trouble if they are disabled or have a chronical illness (and low income), because of the new health insurance system we have since 2006. But it's still a far better system than in the US.

@Strandjunker

530k people don't matter to the upper 0.1% of the extremely wealthy leeches. You want to change glaring social inequality and exploitation of the weak? Then get rid of the system since it's no longer salvageable.

@Strandjunker TO BE FAIR in 🇨🇦 they are pushed into medically assisted "suicide" tho

@gildilinie @Strandjunker that said, I'm not against people escaping terrible circumstances by whatever means.
Shouldn't just be death as an option, obv, but I don't want anyone jumping in front of trains or death by cop either.

It's shit. The whole thing is shit and we all deserve better.

@Strandjunker This is soooo not true, we get bankrupt in Germany as well!

@MxVerda @Strandjunker yea it's terrible all around. However they would have had medicare pay for it. Whatever it's over now. Im just saying there is also a big difference in some EU countries how good the healthcare actually is so we can't look at only cost. It was a simple machine that every US hospital has and this country made it sound like they needed to send horse back to the capital to retrieve 1/5 available units to check internal bleeding. It was ridiculous. Yea no big bills at the price of death.