A couple were told they faced a $200,000 (£146,500) medical bill when their baby was born prematurely in the US, despite them having travel insurance which covered her pregnancy.
A couple were told they faced a $200,000 (£146,500) medical bill when their baby was born prematurely in the US, despite them having travel insurance which covered her pregnancy.
I don’t see how this is the US’ fault. Their insurance, who initially denied them, is with a Zurich company. Do they expect any country they visit to cover them medically?
Maybe I’ll pop over to Berlin if I ever get cancer. Surely they’ll pay for all my treatments even though I’m just a tourist. They aren’t barbarians like the US.
I’m fairly sure in Berlin they won’t charge you two hundred thousand fucking dollars for an emergency procedure, but sure, go on strawmanning. What the hell.
Sorry to burst your bubble of USA-hatred but nope. Germany will not decline to treat you but they will bill you. Oh wait… that’s exactly what happened in the US! This was not just an emergency procedure but 3 weeks in the ICU.
This couple’s insurance ultimately decided to pay. So this is a total non story. It would have happened the same in a million places. Tourists do not get major services for free. If they did, people from around the world be showing up with conditions and just reporting straight to the ER and then hop skipping home.
This story was drummed up to tap into people hating on the US for its poor healthcare system. Which is usually valid. But if we judge by whether tourists get free major services, the US isn’t any worse off.
The costs are not comparable, otherwise or healthcare systems would all be bankrupt. And here we don’t have the same incentives to inflate costs.
Yes the costs would be different. Perhaps 100,000€ instead of $200,000. The fact remains tourists don’t get free healthcare anywhere.
This is a complete nothingburger of a story. The couple got treatment. Their insurance was billed, exactly as it would have been if they’d been in Canada or Portugal.
Their insurance momentarily denied to cover them. Why aren’t we mad at them? Because this clickbait story was created to stoke a pre-existing “America sucks” narrative and get outrage clicks.
And they seem to have played everyone here perfectly.
Maybe they denied to cover them because of the ridiculously high bill, have you ever thought about that?
Edit: It seems the cost of a normal birth in Germany is at most €7500 for a tourist with no insurance.
Helllllo the baby was 7 weeks premature and in intensive care for 3 weeks. The cost of a normal birth is totally irrelevant. You didn’t read the article, obviously.
I paid literally zero for either of my kids births right here in California.
My grandpa had a peacemaker installed, we received a (paid) bill for the cost of the operation (idk why or how, but I remember my mother showing it to me), it was 36k€. Sure the stay was shorter, but it’s also heart surgery on a frail patient with lots of other issues.
How much shorter was the stay? Maybe we can apply some multiplier. At least the example you’re offering is a fully loaded in-and-out final bill, but all this trying to compare the costs of different medical procedures is fumbling in the dark. We know medical costs in the US are higher, and we usually know by how much. The numbers I see in a quick search are $13.4K per capita annually for the US and $9.6k for Switzerland, likely with better outcomes. Was higher costs the reason this couple’s insurance declined them? Maybe. It’s a fair guess, but that’s all. If someone wants to tell me there’s never any back and forth with their EU public health program before a bill gets paid, nor with the private insurance carriers every EU citizen that can afford them also has, then wow, that will have been the best thing I’ve ever heard about healthcare in the EU.
Whether cost was the sole issue would have been a great question for the reporter to ask someone. But as you can see, they don’t even need to work that hard at their job to get the outrage clicks they need.