Free Cosmetic Surgery

in America, trying to get insurance to pay for the basic’s is hard enough…

for example, my new hearing aid… it costs around $2500 bucks…as I only
need one, I escape the additional $2500 for the second one…

I need a hearing aid to hear… simple as that, no hearing aid, no hearing…
I cannot get that hearing aid through any public means, I must go through
my insurance… they might, might pay $800 and that is if I am lucky…
last time they refused to pay on some bogus grounds and I was left with a $1500 dollar
hearing aid that I had to pay for…this is quite common…even for glasses,
which for some reason, is deemed to be more important… I still pay a large chunk of
the costs…so screw people who want cosmetic surgery when I can’t even get
the cost of my hearing aid covered…which is not only a basic, but a necessity…

communication requires, demands one to have hearing… Helen Keller who
was both blind and deaf, said that being blind isolates a person from things,
being deaf isolates a person from people…and I can attest to this…

Kropotkin

12 years ago I was diagnosed with stage four neck cancer.
As a resident of the UK I got cancer treatment that included 2 surgeries, 6 weeks radiothereapy and 5 weeks of chemo. This also included consutation with a voice therapist, numerous consultations, biopsies, MRI. PET scans. etc… A range of drugs was prescribed such as anti-emetics, antacids, painkillers.Dressings for the radiation burns .
THe only thing I had to pay for was $10 for the prescriptions, and parking.
Now having a “pre-existing” condition I could never afford to buy insurance in the US so can never return.
Do I care about never being able to live in the US again?? Fuck no.

US medicine sucks.

Maybe you should take a holiday in Mexico or Canada for while?
When I lived in LA several people I knew used to drive to Mexico to get their teeth done

This issue makes me think that Americans are backwards people in many cases.
The old argument was that the white man was strait and the natives were backwards.
But now the USA folks have some serious problems that aren’t being faced properly.

Certainly the truth.

:-"

It serves the centre to keep the populace dumb so as to more easily control them.
Americans beleive…

…40% in Noah’s ark and the creation of the world in seven days.

…That America is the greatest country on earth yet only about 40% have a passport. IN 1991 it was only 10%. And only 90million have ever gone abroad.

There seems to be an epidemic of climate denial and antivaxxers - Americans are the prime movers of these fallacies.

macleans.ca/society/why-ame … ignorance/

Americans flock to the belief in that private enterprise is the best way to deliver health care almost religiously.

And like all members of a flock they get fleeced and eventually wind up dead.

Sometimes there’s a waiting list to join, due to dental surgeries having maximum capacity of patients. The walk-in ones are best, as you just have to wait until it’s your turn, without requiring an appointment.

Only dental surgery I had, was all my wisdom teeth pulled out due to overcrowding… my head looked like an over-pumped football, for weeks after. :neutral_face:

Had a leg cast for a fracture, and some stitches… but they’re not really surgery.

magsj in the US if you break your leg and have a cast and stitches it’s gonna be like 20 grand at least and quite possibly substantially more.

I held on to my wisdoms teeth for years. LIke a fool I kept putting off the inevitable. One was too dredful to keep. It stuck out slightly and I used to rest a short piece of wood on it with the other end on the table top and letting the weight of my head press the tooth back was able to get some relief. The last one came out when I was about 38. The dentist (a dear friend from 6thform) had to cut it into three, as it was so impacted, and fish out all the twisted roots. That was a major relief.

The plaster cast and the stitches were administered on two separate occasions… so an X-ray, plaster cast, and a shot of morphine cost 20k in America… they’re taking you guys for joke brar.

The insurance company, hospital, and pharmaceutical company, are probably all owned by the same conglomerate… parasite?

No love for you guys… even when your ill or dying, huh?

The level of stupidity is what worries me most.
A few years ago the private/public debate was raging across both side of the pond.
An article appeared in a US Newspaper saying that if Stephen Hawkins had been British he’d have never got the help he did with his condition. Because his voice sim had an American accent the journalist had assumed wrongly he was also American.
The fact is, of course that Stephen Hawking got all his treatments free on the NHS, being British, and would have soon been denied complete treatments in the US, were he American, unless he was very rich as the insurance payments would have been (ahem!) “crippling”.

Yea… I was told that it’s better to remove wisdom teeth sooner rather than later, if they are causing even the slightest of problems, as it only gets worse over time… as you eventually found out.

I chipped a back molar on a pellet shot in a roasted rabbit that I made, and I’m right royally pissed about it… we live and learn.

They do have their uses. When I was a kid I incessatly sucked sherbet lemons, and lost my lower 7th, which was too rotten to save, the Wisdom tooth replaced it and so I still have that one.

Well now that the unimportant hospitalisations have been severely cut, the NHS can return to treating real cases of illnesses that need immediate attention and treatment.

How many £1000s of millions/billions have been wasted on non-emergency call-outs and surgeries… citing depression and mental illness, while cancer cases etc. were delayed for many months, resulting in many deaths.

I would not have become so ill from something as simple as fatigue, if GPs had not been told to put drug-addicts and alcoholics first, as a priority for funding their rehab and long-term care… which then resulted in me needing long-term care.

Thank goodness that sanity once again reigns supreme.

I think your gripe is personal and not necessarily emprically based.
The NHS is generally very expert at triage and quick to spot malingering. The reall problem of waste in the last few years, has been the £5 billion cut in social care with the subsequent drop in places for old people to get discharged from hospital. The government has been quick at victim blaming by calling that “bed blocking”. And one has to wonder at the cavalier attitude to covid is a plan to solve the lack of funding to social care by killing off the old people as much as they can.
If you want to call that “return to sanity” then that is your opinion, which I could not share.
These “old people” are someone’s granparents, and parents.

It is empirically based… why ever would you think it’s not? I don’t do gripes… I work with facts and verified information.

If you are going to speculate my position again, please do not bother reply, as it only serves to dull and blunt my mind.

every time the left here tries to wrangle in the insurance companies, (which is where all the money goes), the right comes back in and will legit dedicate an entire decade to suing all over the country to try and get those efforts shot down.

they’ve convinced their base that having publicly available, affordable healthcare is socialism and the poor, sick people of the south come out in droves to vote to make sure they dont end up with any of that socialism. it’s maddening to watch.

America is not a democracy.
It is a media driven plutocracy, the rule of law and the will of the people take second place to the money makers.

yeah

The question is not easy to answer. But I would say that cosmetic surgery and treatments paid for by medicare/medicaid reinforce the already existing (and especially in English-speaking countries) differences between the different classes of health insurance.

People “at the bottom” keep their insecurities by believing they are no longer beautiful enough, people “at the top” get new insecurities by believing they are no longer beautiful enough.

The owners of the private health insurance companies will be happy about this, but the taxpayers for the state health insurance companies will not.