9thbutterfly:

thebibliosphere:

lizardtitties:

withasmoothroundstone:

robstmartin:

titleknown:

Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…

This….

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.

This explains a lot.  And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce.  Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.  

And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that.  Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid.  Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given.  It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.

I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:

https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2016/01/06/healthcare-in-iceland-vs-the-us-weve-got-it-so-good/

Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

Eat the rich. Resist.

That’s what upsets me the most – because I tend to associate “not having healthcare” with third-world countries where it’s very cheap compared to here, like those “donate € 30, fund eye surgery for a person in Africa” posters I see all the time.

And then you have the US…

I remember a post with pictures of someone’s hospital bill, and while I have no clue what medical procedures actually cost, they were charging like $50 per pair of non-sterile gloves – the same kind that we use to handle pesticides at work, and I just looked up, and they’re € 5.99 for a box of 100 gloves, and it gets cheaper still if you buy in bulk, so HOW THE FUCK DO YOU JUSTIFY CHARGING $ 50 PER PAIR?!?! Like, I could buy a box here and ship them to the US individually and they would still be less than 10% of that price! You know what you do with fucking rubber gloves if you are in a hospital in a fucking functional country? You blow them up like balloons and give them to scared little kids to distract them! And you don’t fucking charge 50 bucks for them.