|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Yoshie Furuhashi
||
||
|| I for one am more worried about the shocking medical bill that I just
|| received for my recent ER visit (the problem turned out to be a
|| kidney stone): $2,812.00 (of which $1,758.00 is accounted for by a CT
|| body scan)! Privatized health care is a bigger threat to me &
|| workers in the USA -- especially those of us without health
|| insurance, like yours truly -- than Al Qaeda.
||
Man, that makes me so mad Yoshie. 20000 Americans die of the flu every year and all anyone talks about is Anthrax. The real, immediate dangers to life and limb are just taken for granted.
I get a full-body MRI here - no measly CT - for less than $1000, and the quality is better than most MRI's in the US. I pay about $1000 a year for health insurance. I just had a tooth capped - not covered by my policy - and it cost me about $40. All of the hospitals and doctors I go to are well in the black; they have good lives. So why this huge ripoff in the US that is simply depriving people of their health and killing thousands who just can't afford treatment or medication? They have better health care in Cuba, for petesake.
My father went to the US for cancer treatment - to Georgetown U. in D.C. and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore - and it would really take pages to describe the way he got ripped off. I wish he had the courage to sue the bastards for malpractice. They even billed him for intensive care for a heart attack which he never had - they just faked the data. He spent a fortune there and in the end his tumors went wild. I finally made him go to Sweden, where there is a specialized center for my father's type of cancer. The guys in the US knew but wouldn't tell us. It turned out to be a lot cheaper with far better patient care and he's doing great now.
The pharmaceutical companies are something else too. Every year they discontinue effective, affordable drugs and replace them with expensive crap. The oncologists here who are treating my father say they are losing patients because of this. You want mass murder, there it is. Drugs giants probably kill as many people intentionally as cigarette manufacturers, but make a lot more money doing it
So anyway, hope you got rid of the stone.
Hakki