• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    30 days ago

    It’s not the healthcare that bothered me most, although it did.

    It’s the cognitive dissonance around the unavailability of healthcare in order to avoid anxiety over the fact that a traffic accident can bankrupt you with no relief. Ignoring the risk takes some serious mental gymnastics and basic math failure to get there, but when brought up in this environment - where a TV show about a teacher who has to cook and sell meth to get hospital money is actually a plausible plot where no one actually examines the mercenary care at all and the main character just pays it - it’s just a part of their existence.

    Not understanding that few other people live like this - cubans don’t live like this - is absurd.

    • DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone
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      30 days ago

      When I watch “alone”, it’s so depressing at the end when they ask them what they’ll do with the money they won. And they say “pay for my wife’s cancer treatment”. Like omg America

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        29 days ago

        When I watch “alone”, it’s so depressing at the end when they ask them what they’ll do with the money they won. And they say “pay for my wife’s cancer treatment”. Like omg America

        probably more noble than the ending to squid game lol

    • ChewTiger@lemmy.world
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      30 days ago

      Yeah, as an American it’s disturbing and makes it hard to believe we can change things. You’ve described it very well.

      • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        It’s a much deeper rabbit hole that I can’t fully explain and I’m someone who went without menal health treatment for most of my life and I should have been treated in my childhood and wasn’t. Up until recently there was a stigma attached to mental illness. Probably because you until the 80s you could get thrown into an assilym and given a labotomy or worse. Lately mental healthcare has become something of a fad. And everybody is trying to see doctors. Mental health physicians are few and far between. Even with health insurance it can be difficult to find one. Some places have appointments booked solid for six months or more. It is expensive. It’s roughly $200 (before insurance) to see a psychiatrist for ten minutes just to get a prescription refilled. The deductible you pay with insurance varies, but can still be over $50 or more. You can go to a private practice doctor, but they likely don’t deal with insurance. Prescriptions are generally pretty cheap, even without insurance, it depends on which pharmacy you go to. Going to a regular doctor for mental healthcare is generally a bad idea because they don’t understand how to diagnose people properly. Giving someone with bipolar disorder an SSRI is like throwing gas on the fire.

        Local jails are full of people with undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorders. It would be much cheaper to just give people free healthcare, but there’s a lot of mean spirited people in the u.s. also due to mental health issues, no doubt.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          29 days ago

          Probably because you until the 80s you could get thrown into an assilym and given a labotomy or worse.

          yeah idk about this one, it wasn’t good but the asylum shit was killed in the 50s from what i can remember. Obviously we didn’t do much after that, but it probably wasn’t as bad. Most of those people probably just ended up in prison to be honest. Again for lobotomies, it looked like we stopped doing that in the mid 50s, by the 60s probably entirely.

          Also the reason mental healthcare sucks is that we don’t have enough practitioners right now. It’s a bit of a problem.

          • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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            29 days ago

            obviously nothing, but we did it anyway and forced a nearby country into near starvation, thankfully they were resilient enough to hold out but not before we labelled them our enemy

            • ImmortanStalin@lemmygrad.ml
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              29 days ago

              It really is a tremendous injustice. Hopefully with global shifts in power they get some breathing space. The world would grow with a growing and prospering Cuba. They’ve had and have a lot to offer.

      • thepreciousboar@lemm.ee
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        29 days ago

        Because cubans are considered a poor, third world country (despite the definition being something different) and because USA considered them an example of evil communism. Sure, communism then was far from ideal, but at least now they have healthcare (according to OP)