UK Guardian writer: 'I'm glad I didn't break my leg in the US'

[BurtWorm]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/19/nhs-healthcare-america

Stephen Bates' intensive treatment after a serious fall has left him bewildered by attacks on the NHS in America

Of all the thoughts that flashed through my mind as I fell from 15ft up a ladder one morning last May, the potential financial cost of my unexpected descent was not one. I had been trying to paint the weatherboard above the bedroom windows of our house; a whim that had occurred to me in the middle of the night (as these things do) while working out chores for my week's holiday. Unfortunately, I reached just a little too far on a ladder just a little too short, and suddenly felt it slide from under me. Bouncing off the wall, knocking off the guttering and a carriage lamp in the process, I eventually collapsed in an inelegant heap on top of the ladder.

In the agonising hour that followed before our next-door neighbour arrived home and found me whimpering piteously for help, left leg utterly unresponsive, I had time to think of many things – including how stupid I'd been – but never the implications of my future treatment. This was Britain, after all. I would, without question, query or censure, be treated by the NHS at no cost to myself.

Not so, perhaps, had I bounced off the front of my parents-in-law's house in Houston, Texas. They are in their early 80s, expatriates from Britain for more than 50 years, and have followed my medical care with what I now realise is more than solicitous interest, thanks to the vitriolic US healthcare debate of recent weeks and the slagging-off that British medicine has received as a result (why do Americans always home in on the state of our teeth?).

When we spoke last weekend, my mother-in-law, Sheila Thurau, had just received a letter telling her there was only $945 (£570) left to spend on treatment for her this year, under the US government's Medicare scheme for over 65s. As her current bill for the sort of medication 82-year-olds need – blood pressure tablets and the like – comes, so the letter informed her, to $262 a month, it will be a close-run thing whether she emerges in credit.

...

Of course, if they were younger they would have to be paying medical insurance – the average annual cost of a family policy tops $12,000. Without it, as they discovered from their doctor in Houston, an accident like mine might leave you facing life-changing bills upwards of $75,000.

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[Kerrytravelers]

1. I just completed the article and reviewed some of the comments below the article.

Seems the tea-baggin' birthers have found the same article. They are making fools of themselves. The first post is just batshin insane lunacy. :eyes: :crazy:

[Heidi]

2. I can tell you that CMW and I will fork out the bucks for travelers' health insurance

before we go to the US to visit my family. Nobody (well, no one I know) travels with the kind of cash it takes to pay for something as expensive as even an overnight hospital stay in the US.

The funny thing is, my dad has Stage IV liver cancer, and if he came here to visit me and needed emergency medical treatment, he'd get it, even without traveler's health insurance.