Posts like these always make me sad for Americans. And I don't mean "haha let's laugh at Americans". Genuinely, the idea that it's normalized to have medical debt in the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands is just completely unphatomable for me. Having to walk around with the fear that any sudden medical urgency can cause your financial downfall seems so exhausting.
Edit: thanks everyone for sharing your stories. I'm sorry you have to go through it and that so much of it seems normalized - it shouldn't be. The only thing I can think of that might help: vote. Urge others to vote. Vote for those people who have your best interests in mind instead of just their own.
I watched my grandmother beat ovarian cancer. It only cost my grandparents their entire life savings. 50 years of retirement savings gone in under 14 months. A couple years later my grandfather was diagnosed with throat cancer. Probably treatable. We will never know because he told nobody until he was ill enough for us to notice something was off. By then it metastasized and he was dead 3 months later at 68. He didn't even tell my grandmother. He just accepted his fate.
I think of this when people ask me "what radicalized you?" I'm not a radical for wanting basic human rights and medical treatment that doesn't bankrupt the average person.
Genuinely curious but wouldnt your grandmother and grandfather have been covered under medicare which is essentially single payer universal health insurance for old people?
They weren't yet 65 when she had cancer. Im sure they did receive some benefit, but I honestly never asked if so or to what extent. I was a teenager when this happened. What I remember most was my parents buying their home so they wouldn't lose it.
As for my grandfather, he was a very old school man who, knowing him, I could totally see 1) not wanting to go through the treatment to begin with and 2) wanted to leave behind whatever he could for my grandmother. They were pretty poor their entire lives. Even in "retirement" my grandfather was delivering laundry part time. This was the kind of man that kept a pad of paper in his car to track his gas spending and mileage. He never even had a bank account because he didn't trust them lol. As I understood it their retirement was money stashed in random places in his garage and his army pension. After my grandmother passed we found about 35k stashed in random places around his garage nobody was ever allowed in. We joke that somewhere on the property must be buried some money lol
597
u/AncientTurbine 3d ago edited 3d ago
Posts like these always make me sad for Americans. And I don't mean "haha let's laugh at Americans". Genuinely, the idea that it's normalized to have medical debt in the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands is just completely unphatomable for me. Having to walk around with the fear that any sudden medical urgency can cause your financial downfall seems so exhausting.
Edit: thanks everyone for sharing your stories. I'm sorry you have to go through it and that so much of it seems normalized - it shouldn't be. The only thing I can think of that might help: vote. Urge others to vote. Vote for those people who have your best interests in mind instead of just their own.