Comment by stavros
10 hours ago
> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
It's definitely going better than the US, where you basically need to beg people for treatment money. I'm not sure what "not going so well" means, in that regard, since virtually every other developed country is doing better than the US on this.
90 minutes for an ambulance seems like a systemic failure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64254249
8 replies →
The NHS is suffering because of cuts from conservative vultures. They're following the playbook of American conservatives like Grover Norquist:
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Same as their playbook here in Canada. It's disgusting.