Oof, well, the MRI came and went and now I have a MASSIVE migraine, I guess from all the contrast dye and the drugs I needed to take to make the MRI tolerable.
Oh gods, this fucking sucks, lol.
Remind me again why I choose to live in this world? LOL
Ughk, fuck, another doctor appointment today, and then on Monday I choose whether or not to get health insurance subsidies next year, with the deciding issue being whether I can get enough income to qualify, with this… medical thing I deal with.
Yeah, that’s the issue. Our healthcare system is such an unbelievably catastrophic mess that to get subsidies, you need to prove that you don’t really need them, by having a high enough income. Seriously, WTF?
I won’t get into the colossal clusterfuck that is our medical system, here. At least not now. There is no way to condense it’s insanity to a few posts. It would take an encyclopedia of criticism to begin to pick apart why our medical system is flawed. But, perhaps a brief overview would be helpful.
The US is unique. We have the world’s most expensive medical system, by far, while also boasting one of the worst, at least amongst developed countries. We suck at anything medical, for some reason. Or at least our system does.
God this place fucking sucks, lol. I swear to god the US must be the most overrated country on Earth. Given the system we have, we have no right to lecture or invade anyone else.
Everyone hates our medical system and the way it works, it seems. Doctors, insurance companies, patients, taxpayers, researchers, everyone. It’s a complicated, bewlidering, unfair mess of a system that truthfully barely even “works”.
Every single thing the medical system offers in this country is hideously, outrageously expensive. Virtually every medication and procedure you get or need is overpriced beyond belief.
Prescriptions are way, way, way too expensive. I recently got a prescription of ten migraine pills that would have amounted to over a thousand dollars purchase price without insurance. Ten pills- they were literally over a hundred dollars a pill!
I have these tiny little patches, that help with restless legs syndrome at night. Without insurance, they cost about $40 a patch! Each patch is used daily. That’s over a thousand dollars a month!
Without insurance, my medications would cost about 5 thousand dollars a month!
Insurance is like 500 dollars a month, by itself, and I have a $10000 out of pocket max for the year, which is typically reached in a month or two. This is of course a plan for a single, middle aged man. No family or dependents, here.
I had a brief ER stay two months ago that would have cost $25000 without insurance. I was there for a couple hours.
The US government offers some laughable “subsidies” which pay a fraction of your medical insurance premium, if you qualify, and you need to have enough income to qualify! Low income people are not eligible for these subsidies, bafflingly enough.
So the federal government pays like maybe half your insurance premium each month, which amounts to some paltry sum of maybe like $2000 a year, or something. You might as well not even bother applying, since your are then bound to do all sorts of crazy, weird shit with your tax returns to “justify” the “privilege” of getting these subsidies, then. And who the fuck knows what dire, horrifying consequences lie in wait for those who don’t file correctly- good lord, they will probably take your children, lol. These subsidies feel almost like an insult, or perhaps a direct slap in the face, to the public.
What a colossal disaster this system is. In no way is any of this shit fair, or even reasonable.
Fuck this place. Doctors suck, the government sucks, everything fucking sucks. What a stupid, messed up system this all is.
All told, without insurance, the price for all the prescriptions and tests and hospital stays I’ve had over the past year and a half would have totaled something like 1 and a half million dollars.
Like… the fuck, guys?
How is any of this even remotely reasonable? How are people supposed to live a decent life with a medical system like this?
And now, we are being trapped in an endless medical hell because of this COVID shit. It will be a prison. No- it will be a suffocation. Like, it will destroy our country, lol.
It’s like, there is no way out, but to finally die. Which may in fact be what they really want.
Fuck this place.