Coronavirus (COVID-19)

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^ I am not particularly familiar with the Healthcare in the US. But no insurance does seem very difficult as it is, let alone in a pandemic. So...they are not covered at all? So this is horrible of course. You will obviously choose to go into debt to pay for healthcare bills or if you can't even do that...probably die. Inhumain!

I can obviously only compare so much.

Here, the basic 7% retention from your wage gets you covered by a national healthcare fund (if you chose so, a private insurance company which considers added coverage in private health centers, obviously, if you have the extra money to pay for these plans).

Around 80% of us are in the public system because...wage. Anyone without a source of income would go to any primary care center, fill a form and they would be added to the public system in basic coverage. Not the best deal they can get but at least they can't be refused care in public hospitals.

The biggest issue with the public system has always been underfunding, available public hospitals, health professionals per inhabitant working in the public system and waiting lists which can become a problem in respiratory illness season.

So it was so very important that the virus would be contained aggressively from the get go. The policies adopted by our government refused to do so and cases have reached over 300k (for country with merely 18 million people) which has all intensive and critical care units around 85-90% occupied. So the government has been forced to pour money into the system all at once to attempt to control the problem (purchasing ventilators, etc.).

Then if you add that the precarious conditions that most low income and middle class people are in right now due to both not shutting things down early and giving cash transfers, we are in a vicious circle. Lack of government aid forcing the choice between continuing work and staying home, lead to exponential contagion which eventually forced lockdown, but these are extended due to obvious unsuccessful decrease in mobility, because, again, lack of government aid forced people to continue to work which then puts further stress to the public health system and so on and so on. It was never a good idea to initially favor economic output by keeping most things functioning because it would lead to the uncontrolled contagion we saw and then extended lockdowns and finally government tapping into reserves to go in the aid of the better part of the population, which would have been less extensive because by containing the spread sooner, less people would have needed it. And mind you this aid, they are still DISCUSSING what it will finally be- Their initial solution was something like 100 USD and a few goods for SOME lower income families and for the rest a f**ing credit. First case was detected on March 3th and here we are still waiting an unresponsive government discussing what aid they can give.

A complete and utter disastrous handling of the crisis if you ask me. And in this regard, the issue of money over people is what I deem similar to the American case.

But what you describe there when people have no insurance is just out of this world.