#usamerican healthcare sucks

[cisplus]

I went to the pharmacy today to pick up one of my medications, and found out that the price had gone up to $120 a month.

I have a decent job, so this *might* be affordable if I handled my finances carefully. But I'm simultaneously chronically ill, acutely ill, and mentally ill, which means I take a lot of medications... I'm talking about over ten medications here.

I've never stopped taking a medication because I can't afford it before, but now it seems like my only option.

The medication in question is an antipsychotic. We truly live in hell world.

[beau-rebloga-coisas]

Whenever USAmericans say that biden is leaning left I gotta laugh because that isn't a leftist. If an average centrist saw brazilian aid polices they would die from cardiac arrest. If they saw our healthcare they would fall down foaming by the mouth. If they saw our job laws they would start speaking in tongues and throwing up.

[oreganosbaby]

A funny thing USAmerican liberals and sometimes even "socialists" or "communists" do is act like they have it The Worst compared to other places in the imperial core (or perhaps, in liberal parlance, among so-called 'developped countries') bc they don't have universal healthcare or someshit. Of course, there are people who will play along with this, a chance to feel superior to the hegemon. I get it in that i think it sucks to not have that (though much of our ability to have universal healthcare of a certain standard and such is due to imperial spoils) but, there's something about it that strikes me as a bit... myopic or alienating. The same sentiments (or fantasies, perhaps?) are not projected onto most countries outside the imperial core with a universal healthcare system e.g. China, Argentina, etc. I guess what i'm saying is that USAmericans like to project a socdem fantasy onto other places in the imperial core as an expression of their desire for something "better" within the confines of a capitalist economy and liberal democracy in the imperial core but, in doing so, they are also doing this thing wherein other places, other states, get to be slotted into whatever role they need to be in relation to USAmerica. It's divorced from like, any actual idea of USAmerica's imperial power even in relation to the others in the imperial core. This has been said a bajillion times but in general, it seems like other countries and their people are just not "real" to them.

[gaphic]

THIS POLL IS FOR PEOPLE FROM FUNCTIONAL COUNTRIES ONLY

For those with universal healthcare:

reblogs are appreciated! (i will suck your dick)

[sailermoon]

it really sucks that the majority of usamericans want things like public transport, and to save the environment, and stricter gun laws, and affordable healthcare and housing, and more funding in education. and the fact that a select few people who have the power decide for the rest of us that we don’t actually get those things like what’s even the point of calling this a democracy

[bitternanami]

im really really excited by this idea, i think its brilliant. on reading this post it had me thinking, like. how much expertise would be necessary to produce something like that? what would it take to implement it?

if i may im gonna spitball a little on this. pls bear with me, bc im going into a fair bit of detail as to potential hurdles, but overall i dont think this is unachievable at all. it would help a lot of people enormously.

im also putting it under a cut bc it got Really Long. oops

(ill note im coming at this from a usamerican perspective, so im not sure how this would work globally, though that would obviously be the larger objective. more research needed.)

i think the main reason this might prove difficult is that a lot of the time, comorbidities with chronic illness can span across the fields of a variety of different specialists. specialists who absolutely Hate to talk to each other 🙄

depression borne of thyroid disease is a great example here. i would be surprised to run into a psychiatrist who even like.. knows that that is a thing that can happen, or at least has internalized it to the extent that its something they would honestly suggest. doing that would mean putting into focus the interconnectedness of human bodymind systems, which doesnt jive well with the way the health industry has compartmentalized our care into distinct little boxes at all.

and this obviously sucks. it leaves our hypothetical patient out in the rain, with no real recourse to learn what the actual problem is, short of doing all of these doctors' jobs for them, as is the case now. ideally it would not work like this at All, but if we assume that for our purposes here that we're maneuvering within the flawed framework as it exists, then it means giving practitioners across the board access to multidisciplinary information they otherwise wouldnt be bothered to look for themselves. in order to do that, one needs to compile it in the first place.

creating an accurate, referable directory of comorbidities with the according sets of diagnostic checklists would have to be a multi-pronged effort, because of how varied and multifaceted the area of study is. so itd likely require the formation of several specific focus groups consisting of ppl from a range of bgs, most critically those with lived experience, as well as good-faith medical scholars. each of these groups could maybe develop a list of common symptoms, comorbidities that currently exist in patients, risk factors.. answers to the question 'what does it look like when you have both [x] and [y]?'

like, the answers to those questions Exist already ! the raw quantitative data isnt necessarily there rn--we're not currently recording a lot of these statistics outside of like. medicaid/medicare, which means the sample set is inherently gonna have some degree of bias, but even still thats Something to work with. we can use what we have to back up any findings and like. Tell people about them.

when it comes to pitching this resource to the established systems.. training existing practitioners as well as appending this information to medical curricula…. who has the authority to do this? legislature? national health associations? those are made of people, and like…. in theory we can talk to people, right?

i mean, im definitely being reductive abt the amount of bullshit youd have to wade through to enact this on a large scale; i know doctors are a standoffish, stubborn bunch on the whole, and therefore no doubt highly resistant to change of any sort. but the healthcare system has been improved before, yknow? it sucked to do and it happened too slowly. many many many lives could have been improved, saved, if the those treating us considered it a priority to listen to sick people. but if they dont want to do that, then there must be ways to make them.

upon implementation, the database would also require updating as we collectively learn things about chronic illness, in order to make a questionnaire/test directory like that a functional tool even as research progresses. so you need the resources to do that, to be up on the current medical texts alongside regularly repeating the initial fact-finding process, to see what, if anything, has changed over time. maintenance would comparatively be a lot simpler than establishing it in the first place tho.

like, its a large large project. it might be out of an individual's means but it really feels doable when i look at it as a, a grant proposal to bring to a nonprofit or patient advocacy group or something. id need to look into whats out there for chronic illnesses broadly, bc i know a large number of those are focused on specific diagnoses, but. i dont know!! am i way off base here ?? are there people working on projects like this already? is it embarrassingly naive to think theres a chance of actually affecting how this all works???

when you get diagnosed with a chronic illness they should automatically offer you free tests for the ten most common comorbidities.

bc chronic illnesses DO often come in bundles like that and people experiencing them often struggle with recognizing symptoms in things we’ve lived with sometimes for our entire lives meaning we have to a) identify that something we experience is a symptom of something that hasn’t been diagnosed and b) believe it’s possible/important/realistic to address that symptom AND c) communicate this to our doctors often/clearly/emphatically enough that we eventually can get tested AND, usually, d) figure out what’s causing it ourselves because let’s be real doctors often don’t care enough to figure it out themselves and will often just shrug unless you mention a specific possible diagnosis for them to check

and all of this could be made one trillion times easier if after someone did that ONCE and got diagnosed, if it was standard practice for the doctor to then pull out their handy dandy reference app and put in the New Diagnosis and be given a list of the most common comorbidities that they must now check you for.

like they don’t even have to run the lab tests if that’s too expensive! Just go over the diagnostic criteria and proactively ask, “Do you experience these symptoms?” and suddenly people will have adequate diagnoses and possible treatment options SO much faster

[morganaspendragonss]

alright, i have slept, i have thought, i have done my normal wednesday stuff. so here it is.

firstly, thank you all the anons who sent me messages. i'm really sorry but i can't reply to them all individually, and many of them are along the same themes anyway, so consider this my reply to all of you. there may be some asks i do reply to separately because they're about a slightly different topic, but on the whole i can't.

i'm not mad anymore. i don't have the mental space, time, or energy to be mad about fiction right now. that being sad, i can't pretend to like this plotline and i am extremely uncomfortable with it. tarlos has always been presented as a strong couple who do have their flaws, yes, and they fight and they fuck up - but overall they have a good, healthy relationship

this has blown that to pieces.

tim says this has been in the work since season 1? well, maybe so. but they didn't lay any groundwork - they even cut that scene with carlos talking about iris in 1.05 - and the way they have developed these characters over the past three years does not match up with carlos being secretly married. i mean, we've also been told that carlos knew as soon as he saw tk in the pilot that he was going to marry him. sure, he thought iris was dead at the time, but that was revealed as wrong before tk and carlos properly began their relationship.

i'm actually fine with the marriage. i can even get past carlos staying married. usamerican healthcare sucks, it was the only way he could help her, fine.

what is upsetting me is that tk didn't know.

and you know what? maybe i do see the point about characterisation, because carlos has been proven to be somebody who doesn't fully think his actions through when it comes to helping the people he loves and he will do things that aren't particularly morally correct. but there is a huge difference between buying the loft and hiding a whole marriage from his literal fiancé.

by the start of s4, tk and carlos have presumably been engaged for several weeks, if not several months (and tim tends to work on a real life timeline so it's probably a safe enough bet that it's been seven months). even if you thought you had over a year to sort the issue out, that is a disgusting amount of time to hide an existing marriage from YOUR FIANCÉ and it's deeply unfair, not only to tk but also to iris.

(mostly to tk though)

there's literally no getting around that he deserved to know from the very beginning of their relationship. or at least from when it started to get properly serious. definitely from when they moved in together and by the time they were engaged......far, far overdue.

so, i guess i lied. i am mad. and i'm mad that tk didn't get to be mad, but after everything.... look, it's hard to parallel between this and the breakup or between this and 3.13 because they're all very different situations. so all i'm going to say is that tk has shouldered the blame (from both fandom and show) for basically everything, and carlos has been allowed to be angry and passive aggressive - in 3.13 it was even played off as comedic which honestly boils my blood because i've been in that situation on tk's side and, believe me, it's not fun.

i don't want tk to yell at carlos. i don't want another blow up. all i want is for tk to get to say - what you've done has hurt me deeply and i need some time to think. we will get through this and i know your heart was in (more or less) the right place, but you have fucked up and this does change things between us.

i will keep watching the show; i know i said i might quit should this happen but that was when i was sure it wouldn't. i'm in too deep to quit, we all know that. we'll see how they handle this. but it has certainly changed how i view carlos and the tarlos relationship, because now we have to look back over three full seasons, knowing carlos was lying to tk the entire time

[faggotcitosis]

when i say the usa is a plague, this is what i mean

they want the rest of latam to be as miserable as them. to have their awful politics and policies, to have the selfish individualization mindset that plagues the usa of "why should i pay taxes for universal healthcare if i might never have cancer or diabetes or get in a car crash?"

chile was used as a petri dish for the most evil neoliberal economy tactics and they JUST now managed to get a new constitution. now brazil, due to its blind support of israel and the usa, is digging it's own grave to suck that usamerican dick and ruin decades of progress

but its worth it i guess bc video games will be cheaper in some cucks minds 🤷🏻‍♂️

Recently, the Bolsonaro government tried to privatize the SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde, translates to something like United Health System). We have it since the late 80s, and it provides healthcare, free healthcare, at that. You know the person on tik tok talking about how they had to spend thousands of dollars every month to afford their diabetes medicine? In Brazil, all they would have to pay would be the bus fare to the doctor. The SUS guarantees universal access to healthcare, whether is that diabetes medicine, chemo, emergency surgeries, whatever. It's free.

Obviously, the money to afford it doesn't just materialize from our minds, the SUS is paid by tax money. Most right leaning economist's claim that by handing the SUS to private companies, we could cut tax. I think it's relevant to mention they were also considering tax reduction over video games, as in, you pay less to play The Last of Us (but if your grandma slips on the bathroom floor, she dead).

Bolsonaro wants to "cede the inoperative Basic Health Units to private inittiave", thus opening the doors to privatize the health system in the country. Funny thing? The decreet doesn't have the Health Ministry's signature, only the president's and the Economy Minister's signatures.

Thankfully, the decreet has been revoked a few hours ago, but I want to call attention to the fact this is only half of Bolsonaro's term. He still has two years to go, and from all I've seen, he might get reelected. We might not have another election after that, considering how disdainful he has shown himself to be towards democracy