It's pretty common for developing country too, but since our developing country have national health care system (which to be fair, have a lot of problems) less and less people have problem with health related bankruptcy.
I'm sorry, is this some kind of american joke that I am too german to understand? I wonder if anyone doesn't know that meme phrase
I don’t really know I’ve never been to the hospital for anything really serious so I’ve been in and out fast
I also live in Britain, but I've never been to the hospital since the time I was born (which was not in the UK) so I'm not really sure how good the healthcare actually is. but it's free so
These videos are just in case you're serious about not understanding it. Where Ai-chan lives, all Ai-chan needs to pay, if Ai-chan is fine with government hospitals, is just USD0.25 per visit. Surgeries are more costly, but it's nowhere near what America would charge. The only problem is, unless your injuries are critical, you'd have to wait half a day since there's so many other people too. Ai-chan is extremely healthy though, so apart from the time when Ai-chan had to go to a private hospital to give birth, Ai-chan hasn't been to any hospital for the past 3 years.
How's it weird? Is it so strange that there are places like the US where you have to pay a ton of money for healthcare?
Proper health care is a human right. Not even setting yourself on fire is a quicker political suicide than trying to make anyone in EU West pay for it.
Don't worry, it is nothing more than silly politics, where people try to make everything black and white. Aka, one side says free healthcare, and other side thinks that just because free healthcare exists means you can't get private paid healthcare on top of the free one. I mean anyone with half a brain knows even with free healthcare, you can still purchase better treatment on top of it if you pay. But they don't want to talk about it because:
Over here we have free healthcare, but it's not that great, so most people that can afford it get a private healthcare plan. Prices for those aren't too big when you're young, but they can get quite expensive as you get older. Also, while emergence surgeries to save someone's life are usually performed by basically any hospital at basically any time (and well, in the public hospital it will be free, and if you have a private healthcare plan, it will be free in the associated private hospitals too), other surgeries aren't nearly as simple, nor are just check ups in general. Sometimes people have waiting times of months to get some exams done for free... At that point other exams they did end up becoming useless for the doctor, making the results entirely useless... The result of that is that people that need to do more niche exams often have to either pay for them, or to have a private healthcare plan to cover for them. Also, some surgeries that aren't vital for one's survival aren't really paid for neither the public service nor healthcare plans, which kinda sucks. One surgery I need to do costs 25x my current wage, and while I can do it for free, the expected waiting queue is of about 10 years. Another surgery I need to do costs anything from 40-200x my current wage, and neither the public service nor any private healthcare plan covers it, so I just have to accept I'll need to pay for those... Eventually... When I can afford them. Since well, they're aren't vital for my survival. ... So yeah... Even if you have public healthcare, if you are someone that needs hospitals and meds and the like quite often, you'll find out that it's not nearly as nice as you might think. Of course though, the US healthcare is garbage, nobody sane can really deny that... >.>
Oh, just wanted to add another thing a lot of people don't realize about the US healthcare system. You see, if something happens to someone, they get brought to the emergency room in the hospital, and the hospital can't deny them. They have to do the surgery or what not. All that happens is any surgery becomes unpaid medical debt that no one pays for that causes hospital bills to skyrocket and the government giving grants to keep the hospitals up. It would be 100X cheaper if people were at the very least given free checkups even if it was limited amount per year, then having them wait till things got way more expensive for everyone. (because when people don't pay cause they can't, everyone who can pay has to pay to make it up) So in sense, the US already has a free healthcare system, just its modeled totally backwards.