{"id":582,"date":"2006-06-12T18:50:06","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T22:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/06\/12\/holy\/"},"modified":"2006-06-14T14:44:00","modified_gmt":"2006-06-14T18:44:00","slug":"holy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/holy\/","title":{"rendered":"Holy @#$%"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a truism in Canada that socialised medicine is just <em>better<\/em> than the American system, except among rabid neocons. (Actually the truism is a bit more nuanced, but certainly the perception is that the average person is much better off here&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Every once in a while you hear a story about some family in the U.S. without insurance that are essentially made homeless by suprise medical bills, etc. It all seems very foreign and strange, not to mention heartless.<\/p>\n<p>This story isn&#8217;t one of those&#8211;the people in question fortunately have insurance, although as the writer points out he better stay employed, and his kid better always be employed, or it&#8217;s basically a sentence of crushing poverty and then death.<\/p>\n<p>Go take a read of this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.heynorton.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/dr_no_and_the_m.html\">Dr. No and the case of the hospital bill<\/a><br \/>\nIt&#8217;s become somewhat of a household game to guess the total when one of these invoices arrives from a recent procedure.  Since we were in the hospital for thirty-seven days, we knew this one would be a whopper.  Sure enough: the grand total is $549,000.  And that doesn&#8217;t include the bill from the surgical team (in other words, it&#8217;s for just the hospitalization overhead, not the surgical procedure itself).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Last time we had someone in the hospital&#8211;Trish and the newly born Sarah in the neonatal ward&#8211;it cost us $45 for three nights. And that was because we upgraded to a private room (at the cost of $15 a night over the semi-private). <\/p>\n<p>Man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">It&#8217;s a truism in Canada that socialised medicine is just better than the American system, except among rabid neocons. (Actually the truism is a bit more nuanced, but certainly the perception is that the average person is much better off here&#8230;) Every once in a while you hear a story about some family in the U.S. without insurance that are&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/holy\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-head-explodes","category-political","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5UQvw-holy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}