Stephen Colbert just did a week long series on his trip to New Zealand. He's sitting chatting with one of the guys from Flight of the Conchords and Lucy Lawless (notice whose name I remembered easily, and whose I didn't...), and he asks them about how health insurance is in New Zealand. Dude says, "It doesn't exist." Stephen is kinda caught off guard for a moment. That wasn't in the script. Dude continues, "If I get sick, I just go to the doctor and it's taken care of." Stephen gets it - his entire framework for discussing health care is fucked - and smiles. Dude continues, "Even you. If you get sick, you go in, they fix you up, and you leave. For free." They then go on talking about the canned spaghetti sandwich they are eating, and what a delicacy it is. Fuck, man. What would it be like to live in a civilized country... ?
There is a 42% chance that a cancer diagnosis will cost your entire life savings. This is partially by design. My wife has a friend whose husband got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The social workers at the hospital said "look - how fast can you get below the poverty line?" They couldn't do shit for 'em until they could get 'em on welfare, at which point they could tap a different set of funds. So she had to tell all her patients she was no longer practicing medicine and they had to move in with her parents. Two years later and he's beat it and she's back in practice... but literally. "oh, you can pay something? well, that's not good enough. You have to pay EVERYTHING." It's fucked up from the provider standpoint too. We've had this doctor working for us for four months now. And we had to run every ICD10 code we thought she could possibly bill against our reimbursement rates for every insurance we take with a weighted average for our projected patient makeup. Then we had to subtract our overhead and et voila that's how much we can afford to pay her. That's her max. That's all she'll ever make from us until it's time to renegotiate insurance rates at which point they're as likely to go down as up because dealing with insurance companies is like dealing with Walmart. It's been four months and we won't even have a decent amount of bills to check to see how close we were guessing because most of the insurance companies? They don't even attempt to pay you for six months. We've got bills outstanding from 18 months ago. So we're hoping? We'll know whether we can pay her more? Or whether we'll have to reexamine our relationship? some time next month. Maybe. But on no planet. Under no conditions. As chosen by anyone. Does our current system make a lick of sense. Unless you're in the insurance business.
Two things - my cousin is in one of those videos, where Colbert trains with Piri Weepu and DJ Forbes. Bloody hilarious how small NZ is that my family member can just rock up to a field for practice and get asked to be on camera with Colbert. Secondly - yeah our healthcare system sometimes has it's faults but holy shit, we get well taken care of a majority of the time. My sister having her son? Spent a week in hospital and had no bills, just some baby stuff to take home to make things easier. I've had specialist appointments after a inner ear issue, all paid for. My prescriptions never cost more than $5 a pop, and they may last me for 6 months - so $10 for a year of medication if needed. My mum had a stroke in 2013 and is on a variety of meds since then, $20 a year for the lot of them. My brother is a severe hemophiliac, entirety of his treatment was government funded - I estimate in the early years before treatment really got good, we cost the NZ government millions with hospital visits, surgery, and Factor 8 treatment.
As you'd expect, we have our fair share of asses but they often isolate themselves so the ones you meet traveling are usually like-minded and open to everyone! So the medication, the $5 is just the co-payment. Most common medicines are subsidised to the point that you just pay $5 each time you get it renewed, then after a while of using it you can apply for high-usage charges and get the whole thing covered. I did that for my anti-depressants when I was on them, $5 every few months wasn't bothering me at all but my Dr insisted we could remove the charges entirely as I would be on them for at least a year, and they did! Last 6 months on them, I didn't have to pay for them at all. If you're a child under 13 your medication will pretty much always be free - like in the case with my brother. He was funded regardless of how much it cost, then once he moved past 13 the treatment had improved vastly so even if it wasn't funded, it wouldn't have been so bad. Thankfully it was and still is to this day! Certain medication won't be subsidised - but I don't have much of a list handy for you, I know some unique meds for epilepsy aren't covered as much so the person pays $20 or so each time - I would like to think after a while they can get high-usage cover as that's likely saving/improving their quality of life. But don't know enough to be sure!