I think a lot of people in the US have their head so far up their ass being racist and doing other xenophobia, they'd rather drown in their own shit than than have "one of them" get something "for free".
That's what 60+ years of fascism-directed conservative politics distributed by the likes of Fox News, systematic defunding of public education, and an almost complete halt in wage increases so 90% of the population no longer has any discretionary income and is essentially forced to work paycheck to paycheck has given us. It's working exactly as intended.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
-President Lyndon B. Johnson
Damn autocorrect, it was expanded saying now it can fix grammar and stuff beyond just spelling, but then it completely ignores that same stuff if it's close enough. Technically I guess that sentence still made sense, and it's not smart enough to discern context.
Every few years I go "ugh autocorrect is terrible, I'm turning it off!" And in the past I have eventually come back to it. Not anymore. Going without autocorrect is actually better than having it in 2025.
The US is an experiment in how much the people will take before they actually start a revolution. Turns out they take it all and they won't start a revolution ever.
To be clear, those conservative politics are shared by both parties. How often do you see Blue Dig Democrats extolling Clinton for balancing the budget (by cutting welfare) or Biden for securing the border (by locking more migrants in cages)
Without exception, every problem with the US has a straightforward and realizable solution being blocked by a piece of shit who cannot accept even the slimmest of chances that someone they consider undeserving might possibly, in some small way, benefit.
This is the sad truth. We are unusually extreme in that sense. But despite this right wing lunacy and constant barrage of propaganda, most folks do support something like Medicare for all. Even people who vote Republican! So I keep hope alive.
Just to avoid any false impressions: healthcare is not free in Germany. You should always get travel health insurance. Having said that, it's pretty affordable. I pay about €80 a year for me and my wife for worldwide coverage.
Same in Ireland but a trip to the emergency room (including ambulance if you need it) sets you back €100 euro which is about $110 USD.
2nd last time I was in one there was an American couple across from us whose daughter had gone into a seizure in their hotel. We ended up chatting a good bit and I honestly was very glad for them that they weren't paying American pricing.
Last time I was in one we had a referral from our doctor so it was free (there's a filtering process to stop people with a cold coming to emergency) Included an MRI for my daughter and we've a follow up coming. Again all free.
So when you say it's not free, it's strictly true but holy moly the difference in potentially life destroying cost and not having to weigh that up. It saves lives.
In Germany you would need to pay a copay for the ambulance between 5-10€, the emergency room would be fully covered. Only if you get admitted you would be charged a copay of 10€/day up to 30 days a year. For prescription medications there is also a copay between 5-10€ for each of them.
All Co-Pays are capped at 2% of your yearly income, or 1% if you suffer from chronic diseases
My son was in the hospital for 4 days and the charge was $20,000.
The ER visit before admitting was a separate $2,000 charge.
We have insurance, so we only had to pay around $8,000 out of pocket. It would have been less, but some of the people in the hospital didn't take our insurance, and our insurance also said that some procedures were overpriced so they only paid the amount they thought was fair.
We didn't get to pick any of the people who provided care, and we were not presented with the ability to negotiate on prices to make sure our insurance wasn't being taken advantage of while they were doing respiratory therapy on our baby.
Our entire system needs to be torn the fuck down and be replaced with something entirely free. I don't even give a fuck about people abusing the system at this point. Fuck it, let it cover elective cosmetic surgery. Never say no to anyone unless the doctor says it first.
My taxes will go up, but I can fucking promise they won't go up by as much as I'd be saving in premium.
Because of right, I pay hundreds of dollars a month for the insurance that then only pays once I get fucked hard enough, and then still doesn't pay for all of it.
Fuck the entire industry, fire them all and seize their assets.
Our entire system needs to be torn the fuck down and be replaced with something entirely free. I don’t even give a fuck about people abusing the system at this point.
Make a lemmy community and make people subscribe who want change.
Relatively inexpensive union insurance for the family $2310. Out of pocket expenses so far $3,700.
Total $6010 so far..
Estimated total by the end of the year - $2310 in insurance premiums, 3,000 out of pocket.
Yearly estimated total $11,320.
2 years ago we had the corporate America special. Premium was $16,200, out of pocket was 8,000. $24,200 was the total cost. It was 26.8% of my gross income that year.
In Germany the statutory Health insurance is 14,6% of your salary, capped at a maximum of 942€/month (half paid by you, half paid by your employer ), this also covers your children and your wife if she's not working.
But on the other hand, there won't be any significant out of pocket expenses here
Tourists pay for healthcare in Britain, and pay a charge as part of the visa costs, as well as expenses if they use it. except for emergency care, which is always free for everyone.
That's basically free to Americans. We pay that per visit if we are lucky. Health insurance here exists to make a profit, not to help people out when they need it.
It's only the charge for the extra travel insurance. The actual health care itself costs a lot more and depends on your income. Don't think it's just 80€ a month. I wish it were
Correct. That's just travel insurance. Regular health insurance is calculated as a percentage of your salary and it's anything but cheap. A lot better than in the US, though.
From commercial providers. It's not necessary for EU Citizens travelling inside the EU/EEA as they are treated like people in the national systems for emergencies.
But it simplifies a lot because you can go to any doctor and sometimes they play dumb and pretend they don't know about the rules and want to force you to pay out of pocket (Happened to me in Austria, I've just reported them to the Austrian Health Insurance, he wanted 200€ which is outrageous overpriced and was a contracted doctor of ÖGK). Especially in Eastern Europe. But that applies only to GPs, Hospitals usually play by the rules.
And it's also useful for travelling outside of the EU
In post-Soviet countries, it was sadly normal that doctors would demand bribes on top of state insurance. The most outrageous shit I heard was and ob/gyn charging a months salary for a birth, half a month if it turned out to be a girl.
Thanks.
I should have been more specific on my question, thats on me. Like, would I get it through my current health insurance in the US, like an addon to my plan? Or would I get it through a provider in the country/EU where I would travel too?
Squaremouth (weird name) is like a kayak.com site for travel insurance. Just put in your details and it'll give you a big list to pick from based on price, coverage, etc.
I don't know much about the US health plans, you might check if they have some special offers, or if they are valid worldwide.
I've bought mine through Allianz, a big German insurance company.
They seem to offer travel insurance in the US too. But it's much more expensive and they have pretty low coverage limits in the US. (Here I pay 30€ a year and don't have any coverage limits for medical costs, there I was quoted 400$ a year for much shittier coverage). But you can compare yourself
Not necessary but some countries have a deductible. Like in the Netherlands hospitals will charge you up to €380 and only claim the costs above that amount from your insurer. So cheaper to get travel insurance.
If that's all you're worried about then paying a insurance 20-80€ a year to insure a risk of 380€ would be a pretty stupid idea, and on average certainly not cheaper
You don't have to pay every year if you are not going on holiday every year. Also not everything will be covered by your normal health insurance, like if you need to get air lifted back home.
Same in the Netherlands. If you are uninsured and not an EU citizen an ambulance can cost you €400 to €700. And even if you have European health insurance you still need to pay the €380 deductible if you need to visit the hospital. And if you are not an EU citizen but have travel insurance you probably need to pay the hospital bill upfront.
The Netherlands has a privatized health insurance system. So yeah don’t expect free healthcare if you visit.
It's not their fault alone. There are actual people in power -- the closest thing you can get to an actual moustache twirling villain -- actively working to build that world. Additionally, their goals align very well with capitalism's incentive structures.
In Missouri, the ballot proposals that people vote for are consistently overturned by the representatives that people vote for. Right now, it's the ballot proposal that people should get sick leave.
People are completely propagandized to vote against their own interests.
Ironically, the sentiment that people are scum and deserve nothing--or rather, that they are greedy, short-sighted idiots--is also held by the villains in charge. So I'd maybe rethink that sentiment if you want to change things for the better.
Well we're less greedy and less short-sighted than many people, so that proves it's possible. How do we help make a world where there are more empathetic, farsighted people? How do we build a system that incentivises acting in this way?
These are questions which have answers. There won't ever be one right answer for every situation, but there are worse and better answers.
I'm down with exploring the lower depths of an eschatological philosophy. I'd just rather not die from a bad tooth if I'm going to be forced to be here anyway.
Get out of here with that left vs right nonsense. The voters have no power, we have an electoral college so the popular vote doesn't even matter. What matters is the 1% buying politicians and elections with manufactured consent with platforms like Facebook.
I left reddit after I realized that reddit was using an algorithm to addict me to endless doomscrolling--not a good combo with the obvious censorship on reddit rn. The equity running reddit can't convince me to go conservative--but they can incapacitate me in helpless outrage that goes nowhere.
Despair is its own insidious propaganda.
The sample size that travel are a minority. A large percentage of Americans don't even travel out of the country.
Worse, I thought it was like a specific type of people. But my company did a poll to gauge where we should have our company retreat, and 80% admitted to not having a passport.
It's a scary thought because I think it's universal in all cultures all over the world. I'm in Canada and when I tell most people I've been to Europe, they assume I'm a millionaire that can afford to travel because even though some of these people have more money than me, they can't even think of the possibility of flying outside the country.
When I visited the UK, we stayed at a place just outside London .. a small town that was about an hour train ride away from the city center called Bracknel. We were just exploring in a rental car (we nearly had accidents about twice a day). We asked people for directions to the next town or a few towns over and they couldn't tell us because they had never been there. When we talked to more people, we realized that most of them had never left town and couldn't think of traveling further than London.
I think in England a lot of families have lived in a certain area for centuries, catch public transport, go on holiday to European destinations, and literally have no need for that information
Or it's a feel good news story designed to make things seem less bleak. You know the ones.
Child works crazy hours to raise money for her own cancer drugs.
Mom takes second/third job, despite social services saying they will take her kids, but manages to save enough to pay for camp for one week.
I imagine in this case, they likely didn't have a concept of a billing system. They usually wouldn't bill anyone as that's not how the system is set up. Sure, there are funds moving around in the background, but it's not from the patient.
Yeah I'm gonna pipe my opinion here too. If I said "so and so signaled me" that would be very weird in any context. Facebook Messengered me? iMessaged me? Smsed me? Snapchatted me? I mean fuck twitter people said "dmed" me not twittered me
I wonder if France had cheaper SMS rates in the early 2000s because that was the big driver of WhatsApp. I have to admit though in my experience I don't think I know of any situation where someone from France has ever used anything other than WhatsApp. I would hate it if they texted me because then it wouldn't auto translate.
Standard mobile plans in France have included unlimited SMS since the mid 2000s I'd say. People still use it, but WhatsApp/Messenger are pretty popular too.
It'd come down to popularity and ease of use, right? I don't know if it's "good" generally to verb a company, but if it's popular and either easy to say or easy to shorten, it'll be easy to turn into a verb. Surprisingly, I hear "snapchatted me" not uncommonly, despite not using Snapchat myself.
Twittered me doesn't work, because dms aren't the primary use. If someone said "oh i'll twitter you" I'd assume it'd be a post pinging me or something and think it's kind of a strange way to say that. If dms were the primary use case of Twitter on release, I think "tweet" probably would have gone there, and if tweet wasn't decided on early posting on twitter would just become "twittered" or probably more like twiting, has to be short and catchy after all.
iMessage and Facebook Messenger I believe are both default apps (less sure about fb Messenger, might be my memory playing tricks on me). The default message app is "texting", which I think is why the others get verbed. Also doesn't help that Messenger isn't that distinct from "message" which is what text means anyways, and Facebook falls into the Twitter problem. Not a lot of good ways to abbreviate for speech either.
I imagine Signal just isn't popular enough, I don't know if I went to a group of people they would know what I meant. Definitely can't help that "signalling" is a real word with a different meaning that humans regularly do, so if you use it with someone who doesn't know they'll just be confused. If you were with a group that had the main chat in signal, I think saying "oh yeah I'll signal you" wouldn't be like an outrageous thing to say. Might be different since for Signal users it tends to be a full or almost full replacement, so saying "text" implies "signal".
Standing in the street outside your crushes house, flag in each hand, trying desperately to remember the proper way to signal "will you go out with me" in semaphore.
Plus the additional information can be useful. If someone says "I'll whatsapp you the details" you might respond with:
"No I don't have internet connection, just SMS me instead" or "I don't use whatsapp, how about signal".
At the very least you know where to look for the message
Whatsapp is the only real form of instant communication in my country (Jamaica), because it still costs money to send texts and a lot of other messaging services aren't even available/supported in the region.
In my case, good luck convincing the average Jamaican to switch to Signal, same problem everywhere! Just trying to give context to the verb "whatsapp".
Signal did not replace expensive texting and offer free wireless communication for the first time EVER in basically every developing country. Get off your high horse.
It's not relevant to the point I was making, even if it's the only thing that's used it doesn't mean that a text message becomes "a WhatsApp" or that you get "whatsapped".
It might not have been a message, it might have been a WhatsApp video call. In which case 'whatsapped me' is a little shorter than 'just video called me' or 'just WhatsApp video called me'.
The app is over a decade in popular use, people will integrate it into language.
All my international coworkers when I travel ask me to use WhatsApp. It saves them money and makes it easy to connect to others. Anyone in this thread shitting on it has either never traveled internationally or is just an asshole.
I wasn't replying directly to you and was replying to someone else, adding support to what they said. Context matters, but I can see why you could take what I said out of context.
Personally I will use whatever app as a verb if it suits the moment or conversation at hand. Language can be fluid and doesn't always have to conform to a strict set of rules - see slang used in any language globally.
Yep, I agree it's pretty annoying. What's ironic though is that in the spirit of shortening everything (like many Americans seem to do), "texted" would've been shorter (and in this instance there's nothing particular about which app they used to do that).
Whatsapp doesn't use the SMS protocol though so if you send a WhatsApp message it doesn't appear as a text message it appears in the WhatsApp app, you have to have the app installed so it is a significant distinction to make.
When I'm dealing with clients I'm mostly told to send them a WhatsApp message but occasionally they will tell me to send a text message and that means that they don't have WhatsApp and I actually have to use the SMS system. They just say WhatsApp or text and know that I'll be able to work it out.
Absolutely not. What happened in this story is absolutely normal over here, regardless if the person is from the USA, France or just around the corner. The cost of calling an ambulance is fully covered by insurance as is all other essential healthcare. Worst that can happen is that you have to pay 20€ for the trip to the hospital to discourage people from using ambulances as taxis.
For an extreme example, someone from my family had breast cancer a few years back and the largest item on her bill for over two years of treatment was a few bucks for the food she got at the hospital.
For an extreme example, someone from my family had breast cancer a few years back and the largest item on her bill for over two years of treatment was a few bucks for the food she got at the hospital.
I had emergency gallbladder surgery and 2 nights in the hospital.... $16,000.
Did that some time ago, because of some issues I had to stay in urgent care for 10 days. I paid nothing of course.
That said it's not all good, here in Italy for example they are destroying public healthcare even in areas where it used to be excellent, I've been waiting since December for a visit to the orthopedist I'll finally have in July, meanwhile I have a shoulder that's constantly annoying me because of a calcified ligament.
They try to force you to go to private doctors, in my case I could spend 150-200€ and get it over with.
people in these comments act like this was a act of merciful kindness, the people at the ambulance just did their normal job in a functional system, they get payed and everything
Ironically when we visited German my wife fell and people scattered and desperately avoided eye contact. I'm glad my oma was with us and able to get a first aid kit. My wife was fine in the end just scrapped up and sore.
I got the general vibe if I asked for help someone would have probably helped, but there were definently no volunteers
I had a relative who once had a serious emergent heart problem (not a heart attack) in Italy. Ambulance to the ER, admitted to hospital for several days, ran a gazillion tests and procedures; huge workup. Was billed because no national insurance.
Grand total: €200. Not even worth trying to claim on American insurance.
It does seem to be a bit of a toss-up between countries whether or not you will actually get charged. Supposedly international visitors to the UK are supposed to get charged but no one seems to know how to actually bill anyone, so it never happens. Weirdly the government doesn't seem all that interested in fixing it either, so it kind of just exists as a pseudo international free healthcare service.
I would think that giving people care doesn't actually cost much, it's having the capability that's expensive. And the administrative work required to deal with the edge case of charging foreigners might not be worth the minor sums involved.
It's what you get in civilized societies. Really the US is so far behind it gets overmaken by a bunch of what they consider 3rd world countries, while those countries have a war going on.
I showed up in Italy to work on a farm for a month.
Ate the wrong thing one night, and my airways started closing up. Despite my Americanism coming through "dont call the ambulance, I can feel the benadryl kicking in", my hosts called an ambulance.
After a 45 minute ambulance ride, a 5 hour hospital stay including chest x ray, monitoring, and fluids, I was trying to pay up. The doctor lady just laughed at me as a I flashed my debit card. They sent me on my way with some albuterol for $0.
We really do everything we can to enrich health execs here in America. Crazy to think about the mental benefits of knowing you live in a society that at least has the capacity to get you through a medical emergency without bankrupting you.
I know expensive, shitty healthcare in the USA is a stereotype, but in my experience it's also largely true. Maybe it's because I'm not wealthy or connected enough to have access to the good stuff, though?
The bills for my latest medical emergency are rolling in now.
The $1,000 USD ambulance bill is almost a relief, since I've heard others say their ride cost several times more than that. I declined pretty much all medical care in the ambulance and all offers for medication/treatment, though, so maybe that's part of it. Had I lost consciousness, I likely wouldn't have been able to say no.
The $2,000 USD emergency room bill? That's just the part that I have to pay out of pocket. The actual price they charged my insurance is $6,000+ for my slightly more than 90 minutes on a stretcher in the hallway. And it doesn't seem to have covered anything specific because the imaging (which I didn't even need), treatment, medications (which I would have refused if I knew how much they charged but they don't know that and can't tell you ahead of time), individual nurses, etc are all billed as separate line items. I was even charged thousands of dollars by a doctor I never even saw in person. I joked in another thread recently about $45 tylenol, but that's actually true. I'm paying $45 for 800mg of tylenol.
Months later, the billing part isn't even finalized. New claims/bills showed up literally 2 days ago, well after I thought I was done paying. Thousands of dollars out of pocket, on top of paying a thousand dollars a month for insurance.
At least the medical professionals that treated me were great.
I know expensive, shitty healthcare in the USA is a stereotype, but in my experience it's also largely true
I had a brain injury from a bicycle accident. The fact that my health has bounced back, but my finances likely never will, tells me everything I need to know about our system. One injury, and I now have a lifetime of bills to pay off. I guess it makes sense in some sick way, I do owe them my life, but man, they don’t let me forget (even if my broken brain tries).
Two major studies in California found 70% of the homeless were employed "productive" members of society before injury/illness forced loss of income, then housing. Yes the system is broken.
This is crazy. I once stayed at a hospital for two months, countless ultrasounds, even an invasive procedure where they sent probes down my veins, two MRI's and the final cost was around 5k... payed by state supplied insurance. I payed 0 and even got payed 80% of my wages... cause that's the law.
FMLA is unpaid. You only get paid to miss work if you use your vacation time or if you had paid for short term disability insurance, otherwise you are fucked. I know a woman who was forced to return to work 6 weeks after giving birth because her leave was unpaid and she couldn't afford to take any more unpaid leave
As someone who hasn't been to a hospital since he was 13 I would love to hear wtf I'm in for when it inevitably happens. Why would they do that? What did they do? Was it subtle? Stupid?
I've worked in a few US hospitals (in the lab, but we worked closely with nurses and doctors) and by far the biggest danger I observed (other than insurance practicing medicine without a license) was nurses and doctors making mistakes due to sleep deprivation. Doctors and nurses will work 14 hours, get called in to the ER multiple times throughout the night, and then try to work another 12 hour shift without sleep.
Another huge risk factor was overworking nurses by giving them too many patients to care for. Nurses need patient caps of 5 or 6 because each additional patient increases the risk of someone dying by 20%
short version, not subtle, very stupid. i had an acute condition with one and only one accepted course of treatment. nurse put in orders to do something very different, which likely would have caused a massive organ rupture if i wasn't keeping track of every minutiae they did while trying to treat me. i refused the new treatment and wasn't harmed, but the MD signed off on it. as it was i left the hospital severly dehydrated because they were refusing me IV fluids while i was NPO.
I thought there was going to be some punchline and I was quite confused at the end, what else would paramedics do if some kid was sick? Then I read the comments and remembered about America... I genuinely don't know how people can live in a country that is so antagonistic to its own citizens.
It's all we know and most of us don't have any other choice. It's wild the stuff humans can normalize when you grow up with it and are surrounded by it.
Quiet frankly millionaires (at least 7 figure earners) while not awesome are not nearly as predatory as those who’s net worth are represented in billions.
I once was visiting Detroit and got very drunk
My airbnb. wasn’t far from the bar and I was way too loaded for a taxi to take me back, and it was a nice night so I decided to walk back to the airbnb
I made it about 200 steps and felt something
Hit me in the head. Someone was grabbing at my pocket and I guess I successfully stopped them from stealth by my wallet since it’s all ripped.
Anyway my head is split open and there’s blood fucking everywhere. I tried dialing 911on my phone. Not sure if you’ve ever tried making a call on a bloood covered phone when you can’t see because you’re blind drunk and your vision is obscured by blood but it’s impossible. Anyway, a couple of people see me and get me an ambulance.
Now, I’m from Canada, and I THINK that I had international health insurance from work but I’m not sure. Anyway, they deal with the blood and tell me I’ll need stitches in the emergency room but I’m still loaded and the bleeding stopped so I ask if I can just leave and they’re like: no.
I call my buddy who shows up to take me back to the airbnb but I tell him: I’m not getting stuck with a fucking American hospital bill. Fuck this. Just walk out and I’ll meet you out front. I wait until the nurse is out of eye sight, crouch low and run past the admissions desk and out into the street, where my friend calls a very kind cab driver who sold us some decent cocaine.
In general, you're allowed to refuse treatment. That's bodily autonomy in action.
They'll want you to sign a form saying you're leaving AMA (against medical advice), but other than that and arguing with the nurses and doctors about leaving vs staying for treatment, they really can't keep you.... Unless you're under arrest, which, it does not sound like you were.
In any case, it's your life and your body, you can choose to, or refuse to, do whatever you want with it, provided that you're not breaking any laws by doing so.
I live in America. But I'm originally from Ukraine. Therefore I have many friends and family from there and because of the current situation I've known many people that came and are still coming over from there and they keep asking the same question: you really have to pay for the ambulance?
Then I tell them ambulances are privet for profit companies. And you can see them loosing all faith in America.
Personal anecdote: my father died of cancer 4 years ago. When they were transferring him from the hospital to hospice the paramedics asked him if he was ready and Dad said yes, he was ready for the last car ride of his life... They sent us a 5000 dollar bill for a 15 minute drive.
Acknowledging that leaving your dystopian hellhole called home is not a possibility for many people why are these people not on the streets protesting?
Diabetes care is criminal.
Maternity leave is criminal.
Labour laws are criminal.
And yet Americans writ large take it in the ass without batting an eye. Why?
What little care we can receive is contingent on having a full time job. Putting food on our tables and keeping a roof over our heads is also contingent on having a full time job, if not a second job on top of that. Everyone is working all the time. We don't have time to go out onto the streets and protest. This is by design. This is our shitty system working exactly as it's intended, and it's designed to keep itself intact by forcing the people it fucks over to struggle to survive, so that we're so preoccupied with existing that we can't realistically enact change.
And there is much eye batting, don't get it twisted. It's just that batting eyes is about all we have energy for at the end of the day.
I work a salaried full time job that provides me absolutely zero health care coverage of any kind. I'm on the ultra-budget tier of healthcare.gov benefits and my taxes get brutalized every spring because I "earn too much" to be on it.
Given the opportunity I would gladly push a guillotine around town, and when that's done I'd push it toward the state capitol and beyond. That opportunity will never come.
What is the expected results of such protest the monied interests and the top half have most of the money like 88% of the wealth and closer to 100% of the liquid wealth. This money pays for the campaigns of the politicians who are beholden to it.
I once collapsed and lost consciousness in the streets in Russia. Someone must have called an ambulance. I woke up in a hospital with a woman yelling at me for my insurance number. (I am a Russian citizen but I have never lived there, I tried explaining I had a traveller's insurance, but she didn't understand what I meant.) Anyway, after I got treated they released me basically as Jane Doe, I never got billed anything.
Over the course of the years I had to go to a hospital in Russia two more times. Each time they would rather not bother with figuring out how international insurance works (basically, I would pay a bill and then send it in to the insurance company and they would reimburse me - I explained that over and over) and just let me go free of charge.
The treatment was good and professional and stereotypically unkind. I'm still amazed by how they'd rather not bill you because they aren't sure what you're talking about than try to get the money and let you figure out how to pay it. Too much of a hassle I guess.
At this point it just increases my sadness. America (my country) is completely fucked and there is no way out of it until we completely hit bottom, like an addict. It will be decades before America hits bottom, long after I am dead and it will take generations to build something better, no guarantee that will happen.
I feel tremendous sadness for my children and all of the rest of our younger citizens that will live through all of this to never see or experience anything better.
My son got stung by a bee right to the neck while camping in Germany (thankfully he was fine). Visit to the local ER they checked him out etc (again, he was fine, but first bee sting and to the neck we had to play it safe).
Didn't cost anything but my signature on a piece of paper.
I've also did part of my medical education in a hospital in Austria, and sure people will get care if it's deemed necessary, even if its completely obvious they will never be able to pay (like homeless people with severe drug addiction), but they were asked to provide a credit card or would get issued a bill if they couldn't provide an EHIC.
Legally speaking as in the laws are very clear. You don't need to be a lawyer to know what the laws are, especially when it is plastered over every single official page discussing travel and visiting.
You need to be insured or you're liable for the costs of treatments in Germany.
People absolutely get charged as foreigners.
In German healthcare you always need a "Kostenträger", but for EU citizens they will instead charge the national health insurance which then takes care of settling it with your home insurance scheme, so it might seem invisible for you.
That's true, but he probably carried insurance as it would probably be mandatory. I'm not sure if this applies only to schools, but universities here are barred from law to enroll you, unless you have provided a proof of health insurance
We could have entire battalions of paid public workers whose only job is to go out of their way to solve people's problems, but instead we get: excess profits (read: stolen value) that benefit virtually no one.
I was living in Germany in the '80s. My mom, a civilian US citizen, had to get a hysterectomy. She chose to go to a German hospital (as opposed to the US Military hospital) and just pay whatever it cost. She mentioned the other day she doesn't think they ever sent her a bill.
I guess he had some form of Health Insurance as it's mandatory to carry in Germany for almost everyone.
Also there is a copay of 5-10€ with public health insurance, but the insurance will send a separate bill for it. You won't usually get charged at point of service
I am not going to defend the US Healthcare industry, but EMS is often? usually? a service of your local government in the US.
Here in Maryland, our ambulance are stored in the firehouses next to the fire engines and staffed by the firemen... Paid for by the county.
When I went to Austin for a bachelorette party, one of the girls passed out and hit her head and the ambulance that came to check her out was also free of charge paid for by the city. Now, their dismissive paternalism was also free of charge because it was Texas, but my point is: emergency services are frequently not part of the predatory American healthcare industry.
It's not that I disagree that our system is shit, it's more that it seems puritanical to require the US to be totally standardized across all 50 states. We're 50 different states because we don't like each other, and the animosity is growing. It's enough to maintain the union with crazy red states trying to role back rights and illegally imprison people.
I don't see Europeans standardizing social programs across all the different countries within the EU. Germany was loathe to even lend money to Greece following the 2008 recession.
Your comment made me look up the way Maryland does it, and yes, it varies a lot by county.
Have you received care from EMS without being taken to the hospital? The case posted by OP did not involve going to the hospital, and so I used an example that did not involve going to the hospital. I had a vague impression that if you require transport to a hospital, you are more likely to be billed for it.
I’m going to chime in with how it’s done in BC, Canada. It’s a very large ambulance service relative anyway considering it covers the entire province.
These are about decade old figures, but you get the idea.
Healthcare here is free except for little bits that aren’t. An ambulance trip to the hospital isn’t free, but it’s heavily subsidized and usually I believe able to be waived based on a sane argument of need or via benefits plans etc.
An ambulance ride to the hospital is/was $850 for a non-resident. Say a visitor from Antarctica or Washington. Flat, there’s so difference or accounting for if the ambulance gets torn apart throwing everything at you or you just slept.
This is way less if you don’t go to the hospital. I don’t remember exactly but I think between $150, $350, and the paperwork was missing your details. Somewhere in there.
For residents the trip to the hospital is heavily subsidized, but lacking any benefits or whatever it’s $80. I don’t know about the non-transport, but yeah.
Like many services in the US, it is highly dependent on the region. In the places I’ve lived (in California and Washington state), each county generally contracted with a private ambulance company (or sometimes several, just to be confusing) to provide transport services. Even if an individual city’s fire department staffs their own ambulances, they may still attempt to bill insurance (since they’d be leaving money on the table at the expense of their taxpayers otherwise). Some of them may cover city residents free of charge but bill people from out of town. It just all really depends.
I would definitely dispute your last sentence — in many places, ambulances are absolutely part of the predatory American healthcare industry. Plenty of people will try to avoid calling an ambulance or try to find an alternate ride to the hospital, since they know an ambulance ride may end up costing them thousands of dollars.
Yeah, I'm in Washington state right now, and my county has a mix of public and private ambulance services. I got t-boned by a SUV once, a private ambulance company picked me up, and I found out later that they didn't take my insurance and wanted $1500.
Yeah, imagine being a parent and your kid is in a foreign land has a medical emergency but you don't know what it is and whether your kid is going to live or what.
I certainly can imagine myself calling an ambulance. But maybe it's my "socialist" mind thinking here...
I recently had severe food poisoning in Cambodia, like, really really bad, followed by a severe stomach infection. I just went to a doctor. Ambulance is for when you're not able to go to a doctor/hospital yourself and/or you need immediate care. I don't consider food poisoning in that category, but I wasn't there so I don't know what the condition of the kid was.
I understand this is a joke, but I’ll still add context:
Germans like to eat Mett, which is basically salted ground pork. Usually it’s served on a bread roll with a raw onion ring on top.
Since the meat is uncooked, there’s the danger of getting a parasitic infection (Trichinosis). Should you get one, doctors must report that to the local health inspector who will then launch an investigation into how and where you got it.
Between 2001 and 2011 (sorry, I couldn’t find more recent data), a total of 63 cases were reported in Germany. “Despite meticulous investigations, the source of these infections often remains unknown.” [1]
Since we’re talking about ground meat, there’s the issue of spoilage. The Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung (Food hygiene act) mandates that Mett must only be sold on the day it’s produced.
Unless you trust the rancher, butcher, shop, and cook have all followed proper procedures the entire time and that no contaminants made their way through... you should treat all ground meat as if it could kill you. It should be fully cooked to ensure there is no chance of bacteria or parasitic infection from the meat. Doesn't matter if it;s the US, Germany, Pakistan, anywhere on the planet. Bacteria and parasites don't give a shit about where they're at (with very few extreme environment exceptions).
When you ground meats, you are putting every bit of that meat, inside and out, in contact with the outside world and anything that has touched the materials, tools, utensils, etc. that it is in contact with since they were last sanitized properly. With "solid" meat, contamination is limited to the outside surface, so cooking the outside and leaving the interior less cooked isn't nearly as much of an issue because most contaminants get killed off during the cooking process. Unless the animal had an illness affecting their meat, etc. that survives cooking to the lower interior temps, but those should be found during testing well before they make it to a market.
The time limits for sale on products like Mett are specifically about minimizing that danger period for bacteria being mixed into the ground meat and growing. There are ALWAYS going to be risks with uncooked and undercooked meat products, it's all about reducing those risks. There's a reason societies developed methods of preserving like salting, curing, and dehydrating to lengthen the safe period to eat after butchering.
Same trust is necessary with the fish used in sushi. In the US I think we are extra afraid because of our history of terrible food production practices and alteration. We basically set food safety rules based on the fact that we have no real culture expecting high quality practices with food. It is all about squeezing every penny out of sales and doing just enough to avoid being sued so the company doesn't have to pay for overpriced private healthcare.
Same trust is necessary with the fish used in sushi.
Actually it's not most of the time. Fish intended for use in Sushi is required to be frozen, which kills most pathogens. But even if that wasn't required, that's the common practice across the board anyway. There are only a few things that are specifically fished and kept alive versus immediately frozen, things like lobsters. Generally the boats freeze the fish on the ship after being caught before it ever even gets near land. It is then kept frozen through every step until it reaches the restaurant or store. Even at fish markets, the majority of fish being sold through there is frozen. As long as the restaurant just maintains a freezer and isn't thawing the fish well before serving, the chances of illness related to that are actually quite low. The fish is generally only thawed in store before being packaged and sold over the counter for you to use immediately at home. It's basically the same fish as the freezer aisle, just thawed and packaged so you can use it immediately.
The same standards are generally not used for things like chicken, pork and beef though, at least in the US. They'll be refrigerated, but not usually frozen until immediately before being prepared and served. There are exceptions of course, some stores and restaurants receive things like frozen half cows to do their own butchering in house, but most don't and instead receive their raw products through general suppliers like SYSCO. And for your home, you're at the whim of whatever your local store does. Just because there's a meat department, that doesn't mean they're getting half a frozen cow in and butchering those steaks and ribs into each specific cut in store. Many stores receive those already cut and packaged from the company's warehouse where that was done days previously, so they don't have to have to pay for a butcher or two in every location.
Trusting them to keep it refrigerated and sanitary is the same thing as keeping it frozen and sanitary, just with different time frames. You are still trusting it wasn't thawed and refrozen in transit and kept at the right temps before serving in addition to sanitary practices.
The only kinda meat I avoided when I was there was the shop that I would pass that said "PIZZA!" but then had a picture of a giant waffle cone filled with a mountain of raw hamburger. I could never bring myself to go into that place because that is not what pizza should look like.
That does not sound like anything that I ever encountered in Germany. waffle cone?
I mean many pizza places are run by turkish immigrants who sell pizza and turkish food in the same place, like Döner and Yufka. So maybe that is what you saw?
And what the hell is raw hamburger? you mean minced meat?
It was just a picture on the outside of a place in Bremerhaven when I was there around 2004. I am thinking it was just a goofy ad to get you to be like "wtf? I got a check that out," because it was a comically large pile of ground beef (or at least some kind of red meat) and just bizarre to see juxtaposed with text declaring "pizza!"
For the record, Americans refer to all ground beef as hamburger, cooked or raw. Hence the once-popular boxed dinner called "Hamburger Helper", which allows you to prepare something stroganoff-adjacent with the contents of the box and a pound (unit of weight) of hamburger (ground beef).
Meh, I'm no patriot, but I think American English is largely fine. Minced meat sounds gross, and for some reason when you drop the 'd' it means fruit. So yes;
Hamburger in lasagna
Hamburger in meatloaf
Hamburger in Shepherd's Pie (no one's ever heard of cottage pie)
Not hamburger in tacos, once cooked and seasoned we call that taco meat (you may have a point).
Ah yes, because meat is the only place things like that come from... wait...
The CDC currently lists 4 recent E. Coli outbreaks. Three of them are vegetable related. One is raw dairy related, which specifically does NOT use food safe practices like pasteurization to kill bacteria for safety. The product is specifically sold as a raw product with the lack of food safety being some sort of idiotic selling point.
And if we look at things like Salmonella, oh buddy. There's a current outbreak related to cucumbers spanning 15 US states. In just the last couple years there were Salmonella outbreaks from Cantaloupes, Diced Onions, Fresh Basil, Flour, Peanut Butter, and Alfalfa sprouts in addition to the meat and other general animal issues. There were outbreaks related to turtles and geckos, and those aren't even related to eating meat products.
Eating Vegan doesn't magically make bacteria ignore you. And acting like it does just puts yourself and others at risk. I think one thing nearly everyone can agree on is that people that put others at risk, are objective worse individuals than those who don't.
There was an order to stop selling a particular company's ruccola temporarily in my country a few years ago. There are merits to veganism but this isn't one of them.
You're getting downvotes because meat isn't the ONLY way to get food poisoning. But let's be honest, you're living on easy mode when it comes to food poisoning if you don't eat animal products.
Not a vegan, just think people are too easily triggered.
I think a lot of people in the US have their head so far up their ass being racist and doing other xenophobia, they'd rather drown in their own shit than than have "one of them" get something "for free".
That's what 60+ years of fascism-directed conservative politics distributed by the likes of Fox News, systematic defunding of public education, and an almost complete halt in wage increases so 90% of the population no longer has any discretionary income and is essentially forced to work paycheck to paycheck has given us. It's working exactly as intended.
Going to assume you meant "defunding of public education", heh.
Damn autocorrect, it was expanded saying now it can fix grammar and stuff beyond just spelling, but then it completely ignores that same stuff if it's close enough. Technically I guess that sentence still made sense, and it's not smart enough to discern context.
They CLAIMED AI fixes this. Of course it's a lie.
Every few years I go "ugh autocorrect is terrible, I'm turning it off!" And in the past I have eventually come back to it. Not anymore. Going without autocorrect is actually better than having it in 2025.
The US is an experiment in how much the people will take before they actually start a revolution. Turns out they take it all and they won't start a revolution ever.
We USAmericans love our bread and circuses!
Bad bread and boring circus 🤷♂️
To be clear, those conservative politics are shared by both parties. How often do you see Blue Dig Democrats extolling Clinton for balancing the budget (by cutting welfare) or Biden for securing the border (by locking more migrants in cages)
I never tried to claim the Democrats haven't followed right behind the Republicans as they marched their happy asses straight towards fascism.
Without exception, every problem with the US has a straightforward and realizable solution being blocked by a piece of shit who cannot accept even the slimmest of chances that someone they consider undeserving might possibly, in some small way, benefit.
I don't think that is the motive.
Usually there is a middleman that is blocking and change because they will lose money otherwise.
It's both, the middle man gets to do his thing because of the racism of the others.
The middle man also does everything he can to feed and expand that racism in order to benefit from it.
Very much so, and buys politicians to further that cause.
That's a fairly standard response of the right-wing internationally. The key is to just straight up ignore them.
This is the sad truth. We are unusually extreme in that sense. But despite this right wing lunacy and constant barrage of propaganda, most folks do support something like Medicare for all. Even people who vote Republican! So I keep hope alive.
I live there and can tell you that statement is quite on the mark.
I live there. Why?
I live there and this is accurate.
Have you?
Just to avoid any false impressions: healthcare is not free in Germany. You should always get travel health insurance. Having said that, it's pretty affordable. I pay about €80 a year for me and my wife for worldwide coverage.
Same in Ireland but a trip to the emergency room (including ambulance if you need it) sets you back €100 euro which is about $110 USD.
2nd last time I was in one there was an American couple across from us whose daughter had gone into a seizure in their hotel. We ended up chatting a good bit and I honestly was very glad for them that they weren't paying American pricing.
Last time I was in one we had a referral from our doctor so it was free (there's a filtering process to stop people with a cold coming to emergency) Included an MRI for my daughter and we've a follow up coming. Again all free.
So when you say it's not free, it's strictly true but holy moly the difference in potentially life destroying cost and not having to weigh that up. It saves lives.
In Germany you would need to pay a copay for the ambulance between 5-10€, the emergency room would be fully covered. Only if you get admitted you would be charged a copay of 10€/day up to 30 days a year. For prescription medications there is also a copay between 5-10€ for each of them.
All Co-Pays are capped at 2% of your yearly income, or 1% if you suffer from chronic diseases
My son was in the hospital for 4 days and the charge was $20,000.
The ER visit before admitting was a separate $2,000 charge.
We have insurance, so we only had to pay around $8,000 out of pocket. It would have been less, but some of the people in the hospital didn't take our insurance, and our insurance also said that some procedures were overpriced so they only paid the amount they thought was fair.
We didn't get to pick any of the people who provided care, and we were not presented with the ability to negotiate on prices to make sure our insurance wasn't being taken advantage of while they were doing respiratory therapy on our baby.
Our entire system needs to be torn the fuck down and be replaced with something entirely free. I don't even give a fuck about people abusing the system at this point. Fuck it, let it cover elective cosmetic surgery. Never say no to anyone unless the doctor says it first.
My taxes will go up, but I can fucking promise they won't go up by as much as I'd be saving in premium.
Because of right, I pay hundreds of dollars a month for the insurance that then only pays once I get fucked hard enough, and then still doesn't pay for all of it.
Fuck the entire industry, fire them all and seize their assets.
And I'm well off compared to a lot of people.
Better yet, have Mario pay them a visit. They have more than earned it! 👹
Make a lemmy community and make people subscribe who want change.
The American system for me.
Halfway through the year cost so far:
Relatively inexpensive union insurance for the family $2310. Out of pocket expenses so far $3,700. Total $6010 so far..
Estimated total by the end of the year - $2310 in insurance premiums, 3,000 out of pocket.
Yearly estimated total $11,320.
2 years ago we had the corporate America special. Premium was $16,200, out of pocket was 8,000. $24,200 was the total cost. It was 26.8% of my gross income that year.
Well 2310$ per year isn't that much.
In Germany the statutory Health insurance is 14,6% of your salary, capped at a maximum of 942€/month (half paid by you, half paid by your employer ), this also covers your children and your wife if she's not working.
But on the other hand, there won't be any significant out of pocket expenses here
Tourists pay for healthcare in Britain, and pay a charge as part of the visa costs, as well as expenses if they use it. except for emergency care, which is always free for everyone.
I pay $250 in copay if I drive too close to a hospital in the US.
But after $5,500 out of pocket, the insurance will start paying.
It's literally robbery. They're legal thieves. They collect until you're dead, and they sure as hell aren't lifting a finger to keep you alive.
United Healthcare got caught forging DNRs. So they will definitely lift a finger, to kill you!
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty."
That's literal, actual murder. No hyperbole.
Faking documentation to make people die
That's basically free to Americans. We pay that per visit if we are lucky. Health insurance here exists to make a profit, not to help people out when they need it.
More death = More profit
It's only the charge for the extra travel insurance. The actual health care itself costs a lot more and depends on your income. Don't think it's just 80€ a month. I wish it were
Correct. That's just travel insurance. Regular health insurance is calculated as a percentage of your salary and it's anything but cheap. A lot better than in the US, though.
Where do you get travel health insurance from?
From commercial providers. It's not necessary for EU Citizens travelling inside the EU/EEA as they are treated like people in the national systems for emergencies.
But it simplifies a lot because you can go to any doctor and sometimes they play dumb and pretend they don't know about the rules and want to force you to pay out of pocket (Happened to me in Austria, I've just reported them to the Austrian Health Insurance, he wanted 200€ which is outrageous overpriced and was a contracted doctor of ÖGK). Especially in Eastern Europe. But that applies only to GPs, Hospitals usually play by the rules.
And it's also useful for travelling outside of the EU
In post-Soviet countries, it was sadly normal that doctors would demand bribes on top of state insurance. The most outrageous shit I heard was and ob/gyn charging a months salary for a birth, half a month if it turned out to be a girl.
Thanks. I should have been more specific on my question, thats on me. Like, would I get it through my current health insurance in the US, like an addon to my plan? Or would I get it through a provider in the country/EU where I would travel too?
Squaremouth (weird name) is like a kayak.com site for travel insurance. Just put in your details and it'll give you a big list to pick from based on price, coverage, etc.
I don't know much about the US health plans, you might check if they have some special offers, or if they are valid worldwide. I've bought mine through Allianz, a big German insurance company.
They seem to offer travel insurance in the US too. But it's much more expensive and they have pretty low coverage limits in the US. (Here I pay 30€ a year and don't have any coverage limits for medical costs, there I was quoted 400$ a year for much shittier coverage). But you can compare yourself
https://www.allianztravelinsurance.com/
https://www.allianz.de/gesundheit/reisekrankenversicherung/rechner/#/angebot
Not necessary but some countries have a deductible. Like in the Netherlands hospitals will charge you up to €380 and only claim the costs above that amount from your insurer. So cheaper to get travel insurance.
If that's all you're worried about then paying a insurance 20-80€ a year to insure a risk of 380€ would be a pretty stupid idea, and on average certainly not cheaper
You don't have to pay every year if you are not going on holiday every year. Also not everything will be covered by your normal health insurance, like if you need to get air lifted back home.
I pay $80 twice a week for coverage for my wife and myself in only a very limited fraction of US facilities.
To be clear, that's 100× as much money for far less coverage.
Same in the Netherlands. If you are uninsured and not an EU citizen an ambulance can cost you €400 to €700. And even if you have European health insurance you still need to pay the €380 deductible if you need to visit the hospital. And if you are not an EU citizen but have travel insurance you probably need to pay the hospital bill upfront.
The Netherlands has a privatized health insurance system. So yeah don’t expect free healthcare if you visit.
When Americans do nice things in their country ... they destroy it and call it communism or "woke"
When Americans are treated nice in a foreign country, they act confused and wonder why their country can't do the same.
As an American I know exactly why my country can’t do the same: Because we are ruled by greedy, short-sighted idiots: the voters.
It's not their fault alone. There are actual people in power -- the closest thing you can get to an actual moustache twirling villain -- actively working to build that world. Additionally, their goals align very well with capitalism's incentive structures.
I guess none of the other developed countries must be capitalist, because they seem not to not be influenced by capitalism’s incentive structures.
They have been of course, but have done a much better job of managing it.
Unmanaged, capitalism will spin out of control. A slow and shitty paperclip maximiser.
Definitely, we need more regulation in the market or it’s only going to get worse.
Yes but the voters still vote for them because voters are greedy, short-sighted idiots.
In Missouri, the ballot proposals that people vote for are consistently overturned by the representatives that people vote for. Right now, it's the ballot proposal that people should get sick leave.
People are completely propagandized to vote against their own interests.
Ironically, the sentiment that people are scum and deserve nothing--or rather, that they are greedy, short-sighted idiots--is also held by the villains in charge. So I'd maybe rethink that sentiment if you want to change things for the better.
I would if I thought things would actually get better.
Well we're less greedy and less short-sighted than many people, so that proves it's possible. How do we help make a world where there are more empathetic, farsighted people? How do we build a system that incentivises acting in this way?
These are questions which have answers. There won't ever be one right answer for every situation, but there are worse and better answers.
And if I thought humanity was worth it I’d look for those better answers, but we’re not.
I'm down with exploring the lower depths of an eschatological philosophy. I'd just rather not die from a bad tooth if I'm going to be forced to be here anyway.
Good news! You’ll die of cancer from forever chemicals first!
Yay humanity!
Get out of here with that left vs right nonsense. The voters have no power, we have an electoral college so the popular vote doesn't even matter. What matters is the 1% buying politicians and elections with manufactured consent with platforms like Facebook.
This isn’t a left versus right thing. It’s all voters. They’re all greedy idiots. Including me.
Democracy was a mistake. Sentience was a mistake. Embrace fungus.
I left reddit after I realized that reddit was using an algorithm to addict me to endless doomscrolling--not a good combo with the obvious censorship on reddit rn. The equity running reddit can't convince me to go conservative--but they can incapacitate me in helpless outrage that goes nowhere. Despair is its own insidious propaganda.
The sample size that travel are a minority. A large percentage of Americans don't even travel out of the country.
Worse, I thought it was like a specific type of people. But my company did a poll to gauge where we should have our company retreat, and 80% admitted to not having a passport.
It's a scary thought because I think it's universal in all cultures all over the world. I'm in Canada and when I tell most people I've been to Europe, they assume I'm a millionaire that can afford to travel because even though some of these people have more money than me, they can't even think of the possibility of flying outside the country.
When I visited the UK, we stayed at a place just outside London .. a small town that was about an hour train ride away from the city center called Bracknel. We were just exploring in a rental car (we nearly had accidents about twice a day). We asked people for directions to the next town or a few towns over and they couldn't tell us because they had never been there. When we talked to more people, we realized that most of them had never left town and couldn't think of traveling further than London.
I think in England a lot of families have lived in a certain area for centuries, catch public transport, go on holiday to European destinations, and literally have no need for that information
"Those that cannot afford to travel do not need a passport" - Sun Tzu.
"Man who walk past airport turnstile sideways going to Bangkok" - Confucius
I wouldn't be surprised if 70% of the US has never left their home state, or even their local area.
Hell, most probably never travel out of their state
Or it's a feel good news story designed to make things seem less bleak. You know the ones.
Child works crazy hours to raise money for her own cancer drugs.
Mom takes second/third job, despite social services saying they will take her kids, but manages to save enough to pay for camp for one week.
I imagine in this case, they likely didn't have a concept of a billing system. They usually wouldn't bill anyone as that's not how the system is set up. Sure, there are funds moving around in the background, but it's not from the patient.
"just whatsapped me"
Lol, fuck off, he sent you a message, not all apps and websites need to become a fucking verb
Odd hill to die on but I'm kinda for it.
Yeah I'm gonna pipe my opinion here too. If I said "so and so signaled me" that would be very weird in any context. Facebook Messengered me? iMessaged me? Smsed me? Snapchatted me? I mean fuck twitter people said "dmed" me not twittered me
If you told someone in Europe you were going to txt them they would think you were weird
"What you don't have whatsapp? It's literally free"
Europeans don't text, they use messenger apps, mostly WhatsApp
It really depends on the country. SMS is still commonly used in France for instance.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1005178/share-population-using-whatsapp-europe/
I wonder if France had cheaper SMS rates in the early 2000s because that was the big driver of WhatsApp. I have to admit though in my experience I don't think I know of any situation where someone from France has ever used anything other than WhatsApp. I would hate it if they texted me because then it wouldn't auto translate.
Standard mobile plans in France have included unlimited SMS since the mid 2000s I'd say. People still use it, but WhatsApp/Messenger are pretty popular too.
French people actually use MMS, which I never thought anyone would.
True but only if you really specify "SMS", because if you just say "I'll text you" they'll just assume that means WhatsApp/messenger.
In my country SMS is free
That's texting and anyone who says it isn't is a fucking idiot, unless they're only communicating via emoji or some wild shit
There's a lot of people who have never been to, and never even tried to learn what things are like in Europe
And it shows
I would be embarrased dying on a hill i was ignorant of
Says the person claiming sending a text-based message isn't texting
There's a lot of people who have never been to, and never even tried to learn what things are like in Europe
And it shows
I would be embarrased dying on a hill i was ignorant of
This is a very American mindset though because people absolutely do say "I'm going to whatsapp you".
It'd come down to popularity and ease of use, right? I don't know if it's "good" generally to verb a company, but if it's popular and either easy to say or easy to shorten, it'll be easy to turn into a verb. Surprisingly, I hear "snapchatted me" not uncommonly, despite not using Snapchat myself.
Twittered me doesn't work, because dms aren't the primary use. If someone said "oh i'll twitter you" I'd assume it'd be a post pinging me or something and think it's kind of a strange way to say that. If dms were the primary use case of Twitter on release, I think "tweet" probably would have gone there, and if tweet wasn't decided on early posting on twitter would just become "twittered" or probably more like twiting, has to be short and catchy after all.
iMessage and Facebook Messenger I believe are both default apps (less sure about fb Messenger, might be my memory playing tricks on me). The default message app is "texting", which I think is why the others get verbed. Also doesn't help that Messenger isn't that distinct from "message" which is what text means anyways, and Facebook falls into the Twitter problem. Not a lot of good ways to abbreviate for speech either.
I imagine Signal just isn't popular enough, I don't know if I went to a group of people they would know what I meant. Definitely can't help that "signalling" is a real word with a different meaning that humans regularly do, so if you use it with someone who doesn't know they'll just be confused. If you were with a group that had the main chat in signal, I think saying "oh yeah I'll signal you" wouldn't be like an outrageous thing to say. Might be different since for Signal users it tends to be a full or almost full replacement, so saying "text" implies "signal".
Why would that be a hill to die on? It was just a response. No one was insisting on anything.
nah I like to flex that one of my friends Signaled me
War plans?
maybe
at least that's an actual English verb
Your mom just Bumbled me.
Jokes on you, you grandma just Onlyfansed me
Doesn't signalling someone sound like your "saying you available either romantically or sexually" or is that just the weird way my brain works
I think it's such a general word that your association says something about what subjects are on the top of your mind.
My association was hand gestures, or more comically, flag signals :D
You could just say I'm a bit of a freak :P
But yeah that checks out
Standing in the street outside your crushes house, flag in each hand, trying desperately to remember the proper way to signal "will you go out with me" in semaphore.
I think that's just you.
Or maybe it's the signal to like, commence the flashmob.
What a weird thing to get angry at.
I think using brands as verbs might be very normalised in the US but it's less common elsewhere.
It's not offensive but it's... jarring or noticeable.
Here no one would say whatsapped or telegramed or signalled. It's just messaged.
Are they angry?
Plus the additional information can be useful. If someone says "I'll whatsapp you the details" you might respond with: "No I don't have internet connection, just SMS me instead" or "I don't use whatsapp, how about signal". At the very least you know where to look for the message
Easy to say when you have balls of steel
Lemmites love to find the most pointless pretentious things to get high and mighty over.
Fred Grindred me last night.
It's like those guys that name brand EVERYTHING.
"Can you get my iPhone 17 extreme from my Hermes leather jacket, it's in the backseat of my Audi R8."
....fucking cringe.
VELCRO EXCEPTION!
"Is that xerox a Canon?"
Whatsapp is the only real form of instant communication in my country (Jamaica), because it still costs money to send texts and a lot of other messaging services aren't even available/supported in the region.
No way in hell do I believe that Signal won't work on Jamaica.
Tons of things work.
When people say things like that, they don't understand technology and just say that the popular thing is the "only" way.
In my case, good luck convincing the average Jamaican to switch to Signal, same problem everywhere! Just trying to give context to the verb "whatsapp".
I don't think they actually said that I think they were just saying that WhatsApp is the primary method of communication in Jamaica
They were clearly saying that
It was probably easier to say that, than explain the social forces at work, but still, they said it.
Signal did not replace expensive texting and offer free wireless communication for the first time EVER in basically every developing country. Get off your high horse.
It's not relevant to the point I was making, even if it's the only thing that's used it doesn't mean that a text message becomes "a WhatsApp" or that you get "whatsapped".
It might not have been a message, it might have been a WhatsApp video call. In which case 'whatsapped me' is a little shorter than 'just video called me' or 'just WhatsApp video called me'.
The app is over a decade in popular use, people will integrate it into language.
Yeah those two characters of savings will really translate into something significant
Whatapp is the preferred messaging app for most of europe because it subverts the complicated and sometimes expensive telephone networks
It's the same as saying you txted someone
All my international coworkers when I travel ask me to use WhatsApp. It saves them money and makes it easy to connect to others. Anyone in this thread shitting on it has either never traveled internationally or is just an asshole.
Or uses signal, the better version
I don't know why people think that that's some kind of argument.
The better version is the version that people use. WhatsApp is the better version because that's the version everyone uses
I am the asshole.
I refuse to install that goddamn app.
When I'm in Europe and people want to catch up, I'm the one forcing them to open their email. Or to actually dial the phone.
No one is shitting on the app, I'm shitting on the language used, go read what I wrote again.
Or if you prefer
No one is Totoing on the app, I'm American Standarding on the language used, go read what I Gboarded again.
I wasn't replying directly to you and was replying to someone else, adding support to what they said. Context matters, but I can see why you could take what I said out of context.
Personally I will use whatever app as a verb if it suits the moment or conversation at hand. Language can be fluid and doesn't always have to conform to a strict set of rules - see slang used in any language globally.
Yep, I agree it's pretty annoying. What's ironic though is that in the spirit of shortening everything (like many Americans seem to do), "texted" would've been shorter (and in this instance there's nothing particular about which app they used to do that).
It might be to highlight that he used WhatsApp, which is popular in Europe but not America.
Sure, but it still doesn't change the story. It's a piece of text, it gets from one person to the other over a mobile network or over the Internet.
Whatsapp doesn't use the SMS protocol though so if you send a WhatsApp message it doesn't appear as a text message it appears in the WhatsApp app, you have to have the app installed so it is a significant distinction to make.
When I'm dealing with clients I'm mostly told to send them a WhatsApp message but occasionally they will tell me to send a text message and that means that they don't have WhatsApp and I actually have to use the SMS system. They just say WhatsApp or text and know that I'll be able to work it out.
Yes but for us reading the story it’s irrelevant if he received a WhatsApp, signal or SMS message
I know how it works. Texting sometimes means SMS specifically, but other times it might mean messaging over any non-SMS app/protocol.
And that message is received in a text form, hell, use "messaged me" if you prefer, I don't care
When Americans travel do other cultures treat them as victims of abuse? Because that's what this sounds like.
This is how every person deserves to be treated.
We are all abuse victims
By feeders, medicine dealers, porn producers, bankers, marketeers, casinos, politicians, pyramid schemers, lizard people,
Absolutely not. What happened in this story is absolutely normal over here, regardless if the person is from the USA, France or just around the corner. The cost of calling an ambulance is fully covered by insurance as is all other essential healthcare. Worst that can happen is that you have to pay 20€ for the trip to the hospital to discourage people from using ambulances as taxis.
For an extreme example, someone from my family had breast cancer a few years back and the largest item on her bill for over two years of treatment was a few bucks for the food she got at the hospital.
I had emergency gallbladder surgery and 2 nights in the hospital.... $16,000.
USA USA USA!
Did that some time ago, because of some issues I had to stay in urgent care for 10 days. I paid nothing of course.
That said it's not all good, here in Italy for example they are destroying public healthcare even in areas where it used to be excellent, I've been waiting since December for a visit to the orthopedist I'll finally have in July, meanwhile I have a shoulder that's constantly annoying me because of a calcified ligament.
They try to force you to go to private doctors, in my case I could spend 150-200€ and get it over with.
How do I get into this utopia
Check if one of your ancestors lost their citizenship due to the nazis, you might be able to claim it back. Or apply for a blue card
i pray to god germany isn't too old and dusty and xenophobic to profit from the brain drain from america
In America, it's actually cheaper just to discard the kid and start over.
"Ah, shucks, this one broke! Shame, had a good run too"
IRL Roguelike. Restart when you get some some bad RNG.
Giving birth is also super expensive though
Haha ew gross 💀
people in these comments act like this was a act of merciful kindness, the people at the ambulance just did their normal job in a functional system, they get payed and everything
Ironically when we visited German my wife fell and people scattered and desperately avoided eye contact. I'm glad my oma was with us and able to get a first aid kit. My wife was fine in the end just scrapped up and sore.
I got the general vibe if I asked for help someone would have probably helped, but there were definently no volunteers
I had a relative who once had a serious emergent heart problem (not a heart attack) in Italy. Ambulance to the ER, admitted to hospital for several days, ran a gazillion tests and procedures; huge workup. Was billed because no national insurance.
Grand total: €200. Not even worth trying to claim on American insurance.
It does seem to be a bit of a toss-up between countries whether or not you will actually get charged. Supposedly international visitors to the UK are supposed to get charged but no one seems to know how to actually bill anyone, so it never happens. Weirdly the government doesn't seem all that interested in fixing it either, so it kind of just exists as a pseudo international free healthcare service.
I would think that giving people care doesn't actually cost much, it's having the capability that's expensive. And the administrative work required to deal with the edge case of charging foreigners might not be worth the minor sums involved.
It's what you get in civilized societies. Really the US is so far behind it gets overmaken by a bunch of what they consider 3rd world countries, while those countries have a war going on.
This is the most “American abroad” story I ever read lol
First time in America? Everything is going to be like the new black mirror ep1. Everything subscription
I showed up in Italy to work on a farm for a month.
Ate the wrong thing one night, and my airways started closing up. Despite my Americanism coming through "dont call the ambulance, I can feel the benadryl kicking in", my hosts called an ambulance.
After a 45 minute ambulance ride, a 5 hour hospital stay including chest x ray, monitoring, and fluids, I was trying to pay up. The doctor lady just laughed at me as a I flashed my debit card. They sent me on my way with some albuterol for $0.
We really do everything we can to enrich health execs here in America. Crazy to think about the mental benefits of knowing you live in a society that at least has the capacity to get you through a medical emergency without bankrupting you.
Was that a work exchange situation?
I know expensive, shitty healthcare in the USA is a stereotype, but in my experience it's also largely true. Maybe it's because I'm not wealthy or connected enough to have access to the good stuff, though?
The bills for my latest medical emergency are rolling in now.
The $1,000 USD ambulance bill is almost a relief, since I've heard others say their ride cost several times more than that. I declined pretty much all medical care in the ambulance and all offers for medication/treatment, though, so maybe that's part of it. Had I lost consciousness, I likely wouldn't have been able to say no.
The $2,000 USD emergency room bill? That's just the part that I have to pay out of pocket. The actual price they charged my insurance is $6,000+ for my slightly more than 90 minutes on a stretcher in the hallway. And it doesn't seem to have covered anything specific because the imaging (which I didn't even need), treatment, medications (which I would have refused if I knew how much they charged but they don't know that and can't tell you ahead of time), individual nurses, etc are all billed as separate line items. I was even charged thousands of dollars by a doctor I never even saw in person. I joked in another thread recently about $45 tylenol, but that's actually true. I'm paying $45 for 800mg of tylenol.
Months later, the billing part isn't even finalized. New claims/bills showed up literally 2 days ago, well after I thought I was done paying. Thousands of dollars out of pocket, on top of paying a thousand dollars a month for insurance.
At least the medical professionals that treated me were great.
I had a brain injury from a bicycle accident. The fact that my health has bounced back, but my finances likely never will, tells me everything I need to know about our system. One injury, and I now have a lifetime of bills to pay off. I guess it makes sense in some sick way, I do owe them my life, but man, they don’t let me forget (even if my broken brain tries).
Over 60% of all private bankruptcies in the US are due to medical issues. The system is broken
Two major studies in California found 70% of the homeless were employed "productive" members of society before injury/illness forced loss of income, then housing. Yes the system is broken.
The system is working as designed.
It’s designed to be predatory and evil.
This is crazy. I once stayed at a hospital for two months, countless ultrasounds, even an invasive procedure where they sent probes down my veins, two MRI's and the final cost was around 5k... payed by state supplied insurance. I payed 0 and even got payed 80% of my wages... cause that's the law.
9 months of chemo, countless tests, scans, meds, consults, two stints in ICU....$0
'Straayaaaaa
In the US right? FMLA? I was also out for about 6 months but received full pay, not 80%.
FMLA is unpaid. You only get paid to miss work if you use your vacation time or if you had paid for short term disability insurance, otherwise you are fucked. I know a woman who was forced to return to work 6 weeks after giving birth because her leave was unpaid and she couldn't afford to take any more unpaid leave
I did not need to use my vacation time and did not have short term disability. Sounds like my company did me a solid
last time i was in the hospital in the states the nurses and the hospitalist intentionally tried to kill me via malpractice.
I've had good hospital experiences, but not in the last ten years.
As someone who hasn't been to a hospital since he was 13 I would love to hear wtf I'm in for when it inevitably happens. Why would they do that? What did they do? Was it subtle? Stupid?
I've worked in a few US hospitals (in the lab, but we worked closely with nurses and doctors) and by far the biggest danger I observed (other than insurance practicing medicine without a license) was nurses and doctors making mistakes due to sleep deprivation. Doctors and nurses will work 14 hours, get called in to the ER multiple times throughout the night, and then try to work another 12 hour shift without sleep.
Another huge risk factor was overworking nurses by giving them too many patients to care for. Nurses need patient caps of 5 or 6 because each additional patient increases the risk of someone dying by 20%
short version, not subtle, very stupid. i had an acute condition with one and only one accepted course of treatment. nurse put in orders to do something very different, which likely would have caused a massive organ rupture if i wasn't keeping track of every minutiae they did while trying to treat me. i refused the new treatment and wasn't harmed, but the MD signed off on it. as it was i left the hospital severly dehydrated because they were refusing me IV fluids while i was NPO.
Last time I was in the states the doctors and nurses murdered me in my hospital bed.
Are you a newt or did it get better?
Am newt
I thought there was going to be some punchline and I was quite confused at the end, what else would paramedics do if some kid was sick? Then I read the comments and remembered about America... I genuinely don't know how people can live in a country that is so antagonistic to its own citizens.
It's all we know and most of us don't have any other choice. It's wild the stuff humans can normalize when you grow up with it and are surrounded by it.
They’d do the same thing but you’d have a five-figure bill.
Even in Canada and Mexico this mostly works the same
IIRC, an ambulance here in Canada costs 80 dollars, any treatment in hospital is free
A single accident or illness can ruin your life and your family
Spending a single day at school can kill a child
If they live though that day, they might learn that abstinence is great sex Ed
Police officers can kill you without reason with impunity
Your leaders are all millionaires who will do anything to squeeze money out of you and you never even protest?
The US is a god godawful place to live
Billionaires (with a b as white says).
Quiet frankly millionaires (at least 7 figure earners) while not awesome are not nearly as predatory as those who’s net worth are represented in billions.
I would be INFURIATED if MY Tax Dollars went to THAT INSTEAD of Elon Musk's POCKETS!
Won’t someone think of the ROCKETS
Look at those paramedics slacking off with a tourist instead of doing their actual job!!!!111 God bless America, under his eye.
I once was visiting Detroit and got very drunk My airbnb. wasn’t far from the bar and I was way too loaded for a taxi to take me back, and it was a nice night so I decided to walk back to the airbnb I made it about 200 steps and felt something Hit me in the head. Someone was grabbing at my pocket and I guess I successfully stopped them from stealth by my wallet since it’s all ripped.
Anyway my head is split open and there’s blood fucking everywhere. I tried dialing 911on my phone. Not sure if you’ve ever tried making a call on a bloood covered phone when you can’t see because you’re blind drunk and your vision is obscured by blood but it’s impossible. Anyway, a couple of people see me and get me an ambulance.
Now, I’m from Canada, and I THINK that I had international health insurance from work but I’m not sure. Anyway, they deal with the blood and tell me I’ll need stitches in the emergency room but I’m still loaded and the bleeding stopped so I ask if I can just leave and they’re like: no.
I call my buddy who shows up to take me back to the airbnb but I tell him: I’m not getting stuck with a fucking American hospital bill. Fuck this. Just walk out and I’ll meet you out front. I wait until the nurse is out of eye sight, crouch low and run past the admissions desk and out into the street, where my friend calls a very kind cab driver who sold us some decent cocaine.
I hope the rest of your night goes ok then. Let us know when you get the stitches.
This was like 6 years ago. Didn’t get any stitches. I thought I’d have a badass scar but it faded pretty quickly.
Fucking Americans lol
Hey, don't pin that one on us. Canucks are crazier than us about this shit
In general, you're allowed to refuse treatment. That's bodily autonomy in action.
They'll want you to sign a form saying you're leaving AMA (against medical advice), but other than that and arguing with the nurses and doctors about leaving vs staying for treatment, they really can't keep you.... Unless you're under arrest, which, it does not sound like you were.
In any case, it's your life and your body, you can choose to, or refuse to, do whatever you want with it, provided that you're not breaking any laws by doing so.
I mean I believe you but the nurse told me I wasn’t allowed to leave so.
It's not a prison.
That nurse is probably just bad at their job.
Bodily autonomy? In the US?
Friend, your body belongs to the state, which belongs to the corporations. That’s called freedom.
So glad I don't live there.
I live in America. But I'm originally from Ukraine. Therefore I have many friends and family from there and because of the current situation I've known many people that came and are still coming over from there and they keep asking the same question: you really have to pay for the ambulance?
Then I tell them ambulances are privet for profit companies. And you can see them loosing all faith in America.
Personal anecdote: my father died of cancer 4 years ago. When they were transferring him from the hospital to hospice the paramedics asked him if he was ready and Dad said yes, he was ready for the last car ride of his life... They sent us a 5000 dollar bill for a 15 minute drive.
We didn't pay it.
Acknowledging that leaving your dystopian hellhole called home is not a possibility for many people why are these people not on the streets protesting?
Diabetes care is criminal.
Maternity leave is criminal.
Labour laws are criminal.
And yet Americans writ large take it in the ass without batting an eye. Why?
What little care we can receive is contingent on having a full time job. Putting food on our tables and keeping a roof over our heads is also contingent on having a full time job, if not a second job on top of that. Everyone is working all the time. We don't have time to go out onto the streets and protest. This is by design. This is our shitty system working exactly as it's intended, and it's designed to keep itself intact by forcing the people it fucks over to struggle to survive, so that we're so preoccupied with existing that we can't realistically enact change.
And there is much eye batting, don't get it twisted. It's just that batting eyes is about all we have energy for at the end of the day.
I work a salaried full time job that provides me absolutely zero health care coverage of any kind. I'm on the ultra-budget tier of healthcare.gov benefits and my taxes get brutalized every spring because I "earn too much" to be on it.
Given the opportunity I would gladly push a guillotine around town, and when that's done I'd push it toward the state capitol and beyond. That opportunity will never come.
We're slaves, it's hard for slaves to liberate themselves in a police state.
I agree though, we have to fight back
What is the expected results of such protest the monied interests and the top half have most of the money like 88% of the wealth and closer to 100% of the liquid wealth. This money pays for the campaigns of the politicians who are beholden to it.
Yeah some of us are poor enough to never forget how obscenely predatory America in general, and capitalism in specific, are.
I once collapsed and lost consciousness in the streets in Russia. Someone must have called an ambulance. I woke up in a hospital with a woman yelling at me for my insurance number. (I am a Russian citizen but I have never lived there, I tried explaining I had a traveller's insurance, but she didn't understand what I meant.) Anyway, after I got treated they released me basically as Jane Doe, I never got billed anything.
Over the course of the years I had to go to a hospital in Russia two more times. Each time they would rather not bother with figuring out how international insurance works (basically, I would pay a bill and then send it in to the insurance company and they would reimburse me - I explained that over and over) and just let me go free of charge.
The treatment was good and professional and stereotypically unkind. I'm still amazed by how they'd rather not bill you because they aren't sure what you're talking about than try to get the money and let you figure out how to pay it. Too much of a hassle I guess.
I used to get so angry seeing stories like this…
At this point it just increases my sadness. America (my country) is completely fucked and there is no way out of it until we completely hit bottom, like an addict. It will be decades before America hits bottom, long after I am dead and it will take generations to build something better, no guarantee that will happen.
I feel tremendous sadness for my children and all of the rest of our younger citizens that will live through all of this to never see or experience anything better.
Make a lemmy community and make people subscribe who want change.
Americans can't fathom paying for something they may not need to make use of. They can't extend their sense of compassion beyond what they can touch.
It’s hilarious and ironic considering they have to pay insane rates for insurance anyway
as a European it blows my mind that this is not the norm is many parts of the world :(
Hey I love Germany and its healthcare system but I don't think it works like that.
If you're a foreigner in Germany you still get charged. They have a mandatory but still opt-in health insurance system.
Sometimes the bill is so low, they waive it because it is too much hassle.
Maybe that happened in a little town, too
Usually you are not getting billed as a foreigner
My son got stung by a bee right to the neck while camping in Germany (thankfully he was fine). Visit to the local ER they checked him out etc (again, he was fine, but first bee sting and to the neck we had to play it safe).
Didn't cost anything but my signature on a piece of paper.
Bullshit.
Every case gets billed
Not in Italy or Austria (I worked in the field in both countries).
I've also did part of my medical education in a hospital in Austria, and sure people will get care if it's deemed necessary, even if its completely obvious they will never be able to pay (like homeless people with severe drug addiction), but they were asked to provide a credit card or would get issued a bill if they couldn't provide an EHIC.
Maybe or maybe not, but legally speaking you will be, yes.
The f does "legally speaking" mean here. You aren't a lawyer, and no, people often don't get charged as foreigners. That's how public healthcare works
Legally speaking as in the laws are very clear. You don't need to be a lawyer to know what the laws are, especially when it is plastered over every single official page discussing travel and visiting.
You need to be insured or you're liable for the costs of treatments in Germany.
People absolutely get charged as foreigners. In German healthcare you always need a "Kostenträger", but for EU citizens they will instead charge the national health insurance which then takes care of settling it with your home insurance scheme, so it might seem invisible for you.
That's true, but he probably carried insurance as it would probably be mandatory. I'm not sure if this applies only to schools, but universities here are barred from law to enroll you, unless you have provided a proof of health insurance
We could have entire battalions of paid public workers whose only job is to go out of their way to solve people's problems, but instead we get: excess profits (read: stolen value) that benefit virtually no one.
title sounds like a line from an Aesop Rock song
It's probably a trap
And they probably even spoke English with him.
Of course they did. An US-american speaking any language but their version of English fluently is quite rare, if you don't count the latinos
I would say this is normal in a society where people trust each other.
I was living in Germany in the '80s. My mom, a civilian US citizen, had to get a hysterectomy. She chose to go to a German hospital (as opposed to the US Military hospital) and just pay whatever it cost. She mentioned the other day she doesn't think they ever sent her a bill.
I guess he had some form of Health Insurance as it's mandatory to carry in Germany for almost everyone.
Also there is a copay of 5-10€ with public health insurance, but the insurance will send a separate bill for it. You won't usually get charged at point of service
Here in the U.S., we let billionaires tell us which of two candidates are "electable", and we then argue over which one is "better".
A vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil.
That one's been grillin' since April, should be good.
Pre.cook.ur.brats👏
I am not going to defend the US Healthcare industry, but EMS is often? usually? a service of your local government in the US.
Here in Maryland, our ambulance are stored in the firehouses next to the fire engines and staffed by the firemen... Paid for by the county.
When I went to Austin for a bachelorette party, one of the girls passed out and hit her head and the ambulance that came to check her out was also free of charge paid for by the city. Now, their dismissive paternalism was also free of charge because it was Texas, but my point is: emergency services are frequently not part of the predatory American healthcare industry.
wow awesome. no one cares what level of beurocracy they are getting fucked by.
This is basically
Yeah no. Not fucking federally. Not everywhere. Until that service is done the way the civilised world does it, you guys need to shut the fuck up
It's not that I disagree that our system is shit, it's more that it seems puritanical to require the US to be totally standardized across all 50 states. We're 50 different states because we don't like each other, and the animosity is growing. It's enough to maintain the union with crazy red states trying to role back rights and illegally imprison people.
I don't see Europeans standardizing social programs across all the different countries within the EU. Germany was loathe to even lend money to Greece following the 2008 recession.
no it isn't. We expect the same from other countries like brazil or indonesia, india, china or russia.
The EU is very much not a country.
Lol tell that to the $1500 ambulance bill I got from when they drove me 3 miles in Baltimore to a hospital
Oh and the dude I knew in Baltimore that ran his own private ambulance service. Yea, they're not all funded through local gov and run by firefighters
Your comment made me look up the way Maryland does it, and yes, it varies a lot by county.
Have you received care from EMS without being taken to the hospital? The case posted by OP did not involve going to the hospital, and so I used an example that did not involve going to the hospital. I had a vague impression that if you require transport to a hospital, you are more likely to be billed for it.
I’m going to chime in with how it’s done in BC, Canada. It’s a very large ambulance service relative anyway considering it covers the entire province.
These are about decade old figures, but you get the idea.
Healthcare here is free except for little bits that aren’t. An ambulance trip to the hospital isn’t free, but it’s heavily subsidized and usually I believe able to be waived based on a sane argument of need or via benefits plans etc.
An ambulance ride to the hospital is/was $850 for a non-resident. Say a visitor from Antarctica or Washington. Flat, there’s so difference or accounting for if the ambulance gets torn apart throwing everything at you or you just slept.
This is way less if you don’t go to the hospital. I don’t remember exactly but I think between $150, $350, and the paperwork was missing your details. Somewhere in there.
For residents the trip to the hospital is heavily subsidized, but lacking any benefits or whatever it’s $80. I don’t know about the non-transport, but yeah.
Like many services in the US, it is highly dependent on the region. In the places I’ve lived (in California and Washington state), each county generally contracted with a private ambulance company (or sometimes several, just to be confusing) to provide transport services. Even if an individual city’s fire department staffs their own ambulances, they may still attempt to bill insurance (since they’d be leaving money on the table at the expense of their taxpayers otherwise). Some of them may cover city residents free of charge but bill people from out of town. It just all really depends.
I would definitely dispute your last sentence — in many places, ambulances are absolutely part of the predatory American healthcare industry. Plenty of people will try to avoid calling an ambulance or try to find an alternate ride to the hospital, since they know an ambulance ride may end up costing them thousands of dollars.
Yeah, I'm in Washington state right now, and my county has a mix of public and private ambulance services. I got t-boned by a SUV once, a private ambulance company picked me up, and I found out later that they didn't take my insurance and wanted $1500.
Only $1500? Was the hospital across the street?
From: https://www.ems1.com/ems-trend-report/quantifying-the-gap-between-expenses-and-revenue-for-ems-services
So $1500 doesn't seem unusal.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services report they reference has a lot of information about how much ambulance service in the US costs to provide and how much they end up getting reimbursed: https://www.cms.gov/files/document/medicare-ground-ambulance-data-collection-system-gadcs-report-year-1-and-year-2-cohort-analysis.pdf
An ambulance for food poisoning? Really?
Yeah, imagine being a parent and your kid is in a foreign land has a medical emergency but you don't know what it is and whether your kid is going to live or what.
I certainly can imagine myself calling an ambulance. But maybe it's my "socialist" mind thinking here...
I recently had severe food poisoning in Cambodia, like, really really bad, followed by a severe stomach infection. I just went to a doctor. Ambulance is for when you're not able to go to a doctor/hospital yourself and/or you need immediate care. I don't consider food poisoning in that category, but I wasn't there so I don't know what the condition of the kid was.
You obviously know better than the German paramedics.
In civilized countries, if you feel sick enough that you don't think you can make it to a doctor or emergency room on your own, you call an ambulance
yes, Germany has great healthcare, but he got sick from eating Mett, so s it really civilized?
I understand this is a joke, but I’ll still add context:
Germans like to eat Mett, which is basically salted ground pork. Usually it’s served on a bread roll with a raw onion ring on top.
Since the meat is uncooked, there’s the danger of getting a parasitic infection (Trichinosis). Should you get one, doctors must report that to the local health inspector who will then launch an investigation into how and where you got it.
Between 2001 and 2011 (sorry, I couldn’t find more recent data), a total of 63 cases were reported in Germany. “Despite meticulous investigations, the source of these infections often remains unknown.” [1]
Since we’re talking about ground meat, there’s the issue of spoilage. The Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung (Food hygiene act) mandates that Mett must only be sold on the day it’s produced.
[1] https://www.rki.de/DE/Aktuelles/Publikationen/RKI-Ratgeber/Ratgeber/Ratgeber_Trichinellose.html?nn=16777040#doc16804930bodyText3
Unless you trust the rancher, butcher, shop, and cook have all followed proper procedures the entire time and that no contaminants made their way through... you should treat all ground meat as if it could kill you. It should be fully cooked to ensure there is no chance of bacteria or parasitic infection from the meat. Doesn't matter if it;s the US, Germany, Pakistan, anywhere on the planet. Bacteria and parasites don't give a shit about where they're at (with very few extreme environment exceptions).
When you ground meats, you are putting every bit of that meat, inside and out, in contact with the outside world and anything that has touched the materials, tools, utensils, etc. that it is in contact with since they were last sanitized properly. With "solid" meat, contamination is limited to the outside surface, so cooking the outside and leaving the interior less cooked isn't nearly as much of an issue because most contaminants get killed off during the cooking process. Unless the animal had an illness affecting their meat, etc. that survives cooking to the lower interior temps, but those should be found during testing well before they make it to a market.
The time limits for sale on products like Mett are specifically about minimizing that danger period for bacteria being mixed into the ground meat and growing. There are ALWAYS going to be risks with uncooked and undercooked meat products, it's all about reducing those risks. There's a reason societies developed methods of preserving like salting, curing, and dehydrating to lengthen the safe period to eat after butchering.
Same trust is necessary with the fish used in sushi. In the US I think we are extra afraid because of our history of terrible food production practices and alteration. We basically set food safety rules based on the fact that we have no real culture expecting high quality practices with food. It is all about squeezing every penny out of sales and doing just enough to avoid being sued so the company doesn't have to pay for overpriced private healthcare.
Actually it's not most of the time. Fish intended for use in Sushi is required to be frozen, which kills most pathogens. But even if that wasn't required, that's the common practice across the board anyway. There are only a few things that are specifically fished and kept alive versus immediately frozen, things like lobsters. Generally the boats freeze the fish on the ship after being caught before it ever even gets near land. It is then kept frozen through every step until it reaches the restaurant or store. Even at fish markets, the majority of fish being sold through there is frozen. As long as the restaurant just maintains a freezer and isn't thawing the fish well before serving, the chances of illness related to that are actually quite low. The fish is generally only thawed in store before being packaged and sold over the counter for you to use immediately at home. It's basically the same fish as the freezer aisle, just thawed and packaged so you can use it immediately.
The same standards are generally not used for things like chicken, pork and beef though, at least in the US. They'll be refrigerated, but not usually frozen until immediately before being prepared and served. There are exceptions of course, some stores and restaurants receive things like frozen half cows to do their own butchering in house, but most don't and instead receive their raw products through general suppliers like SYSCO. And for your home, you're at the whim of whatever your local store does. Just because there's a meat department, that doesn't mean they're getting half a frozen cow in and butchering those steaks and ribs into each specific cut in store. Many stores receive those already cut and packaged from the company's warehouse where that was done days previously, so they don't have to have to pay for a butcher or two in every location.
Trusting them to keep it refrigerated and sanitary is the same thing as keeping it frozen and sanitary, just with different time frames. You are still trusting it wasn't thawed and refrozen in transit and kept at the right temps before serving in addition to sanitary practices.
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See you soon, mein freund. Auch zwei bier bitte.
Gonna be honest, that sounds pretty rad right about now.
The only kinda meat I avoided when I was there was the shop that I would pass that said "PIZZA!" but then had a picture of a giant waffle cone filled with a mountain of raw hamburger. I could never bring myself to go into that place because that is not what pizza should look like.
That does not sound like anything that I ever encountered in Germany. waffle cone?
I mean many pizza places are run by turkish immigrants who sell pizza and turkish food in the same place, like Döner and Yufka. So maybe that is what you saw?
And what the hell is raw hamburger? you mean minced meat?
It was just a picture on the outside of a place in Bremerhaven when I was there around 2004. I am thinking it was just a goofy ad to get you to be like "wtf? I got a check that out," because it was a comically large pile of ground beef (or at least some kind of red meat) and just bizarre to see juxtaposed with text declaring "pizza!"
For the record, Americans refer to all ground beef as hamburger, cooked or raw. Hence the once-popular boxed dinner called "Hamburger Helper", which allows you to prepare something stroganoff-adjacent with the contents of the box and a pound (unit of weight) of hamburger (ground beef).
Yes, English (Simplified) really sounds like it’s how 5-year olds talk.
Hamburger in lasagne?
Meh, I'm no patriot, but I think American English is largely fine. Minced meat sounds gross, and for some reason when you drop the 'd' it means fruit. So yes;
Hamburger in lasagna
Hamburger in meatloaf
Hamburger in Shepherd's Pie (no one's ever heard of cottage pie)
Not hamburger in tacos, once cooked and seasoned we call that taco meat (you may have a point).
Is it possible that you saw a kebab shop that also sold pizzas?
Reject food poisoning, go vegan 💚
Food poisoning is entirely possible to get from improperly cleaned vegetables, and they are frequently sources of e coli outbreaks in the US.
Unfortunately going vegan only protects you from animal product provided foodborne illness.
I have been sick three times from ecoli outbreaks, triggering mass recalls of vegetable produce but never from animal products lol
Reject e-coli, fertilize vegan 💚
MFW I am in a "make vegans look stupid" competition and my opponent is an actual vegan...
Ah yes, because meat is the only place things like that come from... wait...
The CDC currently lists 4 recent E. Coli outbreaks. Three of them are vegetable related. One is raw dairy related, which specifically does NOT use food safe practices like pasteurization to kill bacteria for safety. The product is specifically sold as a raw product with the lack of food safety being some sort of idiotic selling point.
And if we look at things like Salmonella, oh buddy. There's a current outbreak related to cucumbers spanning 15 US states. In just the last couple years there were Salmonella outbreaks from Cantaloupes, Diced Onions, Fresh Basil, Flour, Peanut Butter, and Alfalfa sprouts in addition to the meat and other general animal issues. There were outbreaks related to turtles and geckos, and those aren't even related to eating meat products.
Eating Vegan doesn't magically make bacteria ignore you. And acting like it does just puts yourself and others at risk. I think one thing nearly everyone can agree on is that people that put others at risk, are objective worse individuals than those who don't.
There was an order to stop selling a particular company's ruccola temporarily in my country a few years ago. There are merits to veganism but this isn't one of them.
You're getting downvotes because meat isn't the ONLY way to get food poisoning. But let's be honest, you're living on easy mode when it comes to food poisoning if you don't eat animal products.
Not a vegan, just think people are too easily triggered.
Never
Why