Kind of. The hospitals and clinics don’t want that, in part because a sick patient is a revenue stream and in part because I’m sure a lot of medical professionals genuinely care about their patients.

I’d say the health insurance companies are more interested in a sick patient’s death. They’d prefer healthy people paying premiums but not having a lot of claims. It increases their profits.

On Oct. 20, 1972, Nixon signed H.R. 1 into law. The law automatically qualified anyone with chronic renal disease, anyone who would need a kidney transplant, for Medicare, regardless of age.

So Medicare covers transplants and post care for a period and I was eligible even at my relatively young age, early 30s.

That said, the poor life choices that I made that led to needing the transplants also left me in a pretty big financial hole before healthcare and I had a month long hospital stay long before the transplant when I first got really sick.

In the end I filed for bankruptcy to free myself from the medical debt but also to get a clean start on the life I fucked up.

Even with the existing social safety nets it’s incredibly easy to go broke with our healthcare system.

Some kind of organ transplant?

Bingo! The cost of a liver transplant in the US is about $878,400. I had liver and kidney.

On top of that I needed dialysis 3x a week for ~6 months before the transplant and that was billed out at a little of $7,000 per visit, north of $21,000 a week, for 26 weeks, over $500,000 billed for that alone.

Healthcare costs in the US are absolutely gross!

Not yet on that one, good guess though. That’s another I think is pretty up there!

Nope, although I can only imagine what they bill for that!

Nope, but not a bad guess. Most appendectomies are laparoscopic andrelatively quick and simple.

I had a surgery in 2017 that was billed out at right around $1,000,000 total. Literally saved my life.

Bonus points to anyone who can guess what it was!

This is what it is for me. I’m blind in one eye and wear glasses because I’m near sighted with astigmatism in the other.

It’s really hard for me to tell the difference and most of my library is 1080 or 720 because it mostly looks the same to me. I don’t want to give up the extra storage Ford 4k files.

The first thing the picture made me think of was that OK white power symbol racist bigoted fucks use.

Edit: I stand by what I said but also because I don’t know things and learn them everyday:

While it’s true that some Filipinos use this gesture to mean ‘okay,’ Filipinos more commonly use it to mean ‘money,’ or ‘pera,’ ‘kwarta,’ ‘datung,’ ‘anda’ (slang words for ‘money’).

That’s all for today’s Dumb American Learns About Other Cultures!