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Correct me if I'm wrong. If you didn't have a credit card, you'd just be left on the street to die ?
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NO that is absolutely NOT the case. I can tell you from experience. My daughter had excellent insurance when she was in college and a 3 month wait between the time that it lapsed and her new plan kicked in. And of course she needed to go to the ER during that time. She was billed for the cost of treatment and a few months later when the bill came she called them and said that she couldn't afford to make the payments yet. They gave her a grace period and then a
very affordable, no interest payment plan.
My own medical bills were ASTRONOMICAL but we made payments when we could, changed to another plan that covered my choice of facilities, and yes we altered our lifestyle.
As I've said...there are good and bad points to both systems but if I had had to wait AT ALL I would have died. And not once in 11 years has anyone asked me about my ability to pay before treating me.
Please no offense, (and you'll all understand that we Americans are feeling particularly patriotic this week.) I'm not denigrating your system and ours is not perfect but if you were to read only Kathryn's posts you would get a very skewed picture of the way things are here.