U.S. healthcare: What if you’re a tourist and got sick?
I will start with the first question. Tourists or other temporary visa holders who fall sick during their stay here have at least three options. The first is to get a visitor’s insurance before their visit. However, only visitors who will stay here from between 5 days and 12 months are eligible for a visitor’s […]
I will start with the first question. Tourists or other temporary visa holders who fall sick during their stay here have at least three options. The first is to get a visitor’s insurance before their visit. However, only visitors who will stay here from between 5 days and 12 months are eligible for a visitor’s insurance. Of course, as you would expect, a very good visitor’s health insurance that will be tenable in all U.S. hospitals is expensive. So this is only an option for people at the upper end of the social scale.
The second option is to go to what Americans call “mini-clinics.” Mini-clinics are small, bare-bone but nonetheless well-equipped health centers created to handle routine and minor ailments like the flu, fever, etc. They are usually found in such ubiquitous retail stores as CVS Pharmacy, Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Target, Publix, etc. Unlike regular hospitals, no appointment is required to see a nurse practitioner or an on-call doctor, and people can be treated even if they don’t have health insurance. The clinics are also relatively inexpensive and typically charge less than $50 (about 7,400 naira) an office visit. Plus, they accept payment in cash, which is a good deal for visitors especially from cash-based economies like Nigeria.
However, mini-clinics cannot handle complicated medical emergencies. So what happens when a visitor has a medical emergency? Well, there is only one option: rush to the emergency room, which by current law can’t refuse to treat patients on account of inability to pay. In many such cases, my friends here tell me, American tax payers end up picking the bill since emergency room bills are often so atrociously extortionate that ordinary mortals can’t afford them. (By the way, after my insurance company paid 80 percent of the $4100 bill I received for a fever I was treated for at an emergency room, I paid $840, that is, about N125,000, from my pocket, which is still inordinately high-priced for the treatment of a mere fever).
And this brings me to the reason for my repulsion against the whole idea of profit-driven health insurance, especially as it is practiced in America. First off, the idea of paying upfront for a service you currently have no need for, and may never even have a need for, strikes me as singularly dishonest. I have been paying into a health insurance account for all the years I have been here and had never had a reason to visit a hospital until recently. Yet, I won’t be refunded the money I paid in the past for services I never used.
Perhaps, I find this practice anomalous and counter-intuitive, even fraudulent, because I come from a “pay-as-you-go” consumer culture. I probably would have opted out of having health insurance if I had an option. I have health insurance because it’s part of the terms of my employment. My employers, by the way, also pay a periodic premium on my behalf to the insurance company—in addition to what I pay from my pocket. That’s why insurance companies here are some of the top-grossing business concerns here.
My second problem with American health insurance flows from the first: the utter moral perversion in the idea of making conscienceless profit from people’s misery. Insurance companies here have a whole host of devious tactics that they deploy to refuse to honor their subscribers’ claims. The most common is what they call “pre-existing condition.” That means if you have an illness, say cancer or sickle cell, prior to signing up for a heath insurance, the insurance company would not pay for any complications arising from these conditions.
In theory, it will only pay for sicknesses you contract after you have signed an agreement with them. That is what killed Barack Obama’s mother in 1995, and that’s why he’s personally and emotionally invested in reforming the healthcare system. His mother’s insurance company said the cancer she was diagnosed with was a “preexisting condition” and refused to pay for it. So she died a slow, painful death because she didn’t have the money to pay for expensive cancer treatment, although she had paid thousands of dollars to her insurance company in the past. Thousands of other people have died and continue to die in similar circumstances.