got the bratwurst from the back of the grill
got the bratwurst from the back of the grill
176 comments
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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Where do you get travel health insurance from?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Americans have been convinced that government cannot do anything effectively and that they have no ability to change this.
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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.
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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.
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"Those that cannot afford to travel do not need a passport" - Sun Tzu.
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I wouldn't be surprised if 70% of the US has never left their home state, or even their local area.
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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.
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When Americans travel do other cultures treat them as victims of abuse? Because that's what this sounds like.
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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.
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In America, it's actually cheaper just to discard the kid and start over.
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"Ah, shucks, this one broke! Shame, had a good run too"
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IRL Roguelike. Restart when you get some some bad RNG.
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Giving birth is also super expensive though
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah, in most of the rest of the world people try to help each other out
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Haha ew gross 💀
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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
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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
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First time in America? Everything is going to be like the new black mirror ep1. Everything subscription
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This is the most “American abroad” story I ever read lol
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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.
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Was that a work exchange situation?
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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.
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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).
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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.
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At least the medical professionals that treated me were great
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.
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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.
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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.
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They’d do the same thing but you’d have a five-figure bill.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s hilarious and ironic considering they have to pay insane rates for insurance anyway
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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.
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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.
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Make a lemmy community and make people subscribe who want change.
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as a European it blows my mind that this is not the norm is many parts of the world :(
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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.
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title sounds like a line from an Aesop Rock song
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It's probably a trap
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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.
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t EMS is often? usually? a service of your local government in the US.
wow awesome. no one cares what level of beurocracy they are getting fucked by.
This is basically
Weed is legal in the united states
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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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And they probably even spoke English with him.
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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
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I would say this is normal in a society where people trust each other.
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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
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yes, Germany has great healthcare, but he got sick from eating Mett, so s it really civilized?
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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.
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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.
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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.
See you soon, mein freund. Auch zwei bier bitte.
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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.
Gonna be honest, that sounds pretty rad right about now.
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Reject food poisoning, go vegan 💚
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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.
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MFW I am in a "make vegans look stupid" competition and my opponent is an actual vegan...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Never
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An ambulance for food poisoning? Really?
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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...
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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.
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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
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Pre.cook.ur.brats👏
176 comments
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.
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.
I don't think that is the motive.
Usually there is a middleman that is blocking and change because they will lose money otherwise.
That's a fairly standard response of the right-wing internationally. The key is to just straight up ignore them.
Have you ever been to the USA?
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?
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.