It’s easy not to trust a system associated with charging you $500 for Tylenol. Much easier (and occasionally even safer) to just smell some lavender and hope that helps. Go to an ED and you could just die of a stroke or heart attack in the waiting room or even get run over by somebody who died of a heart attack while driving and just plowed through the waiting room because they couldn’t afford an ambulance. And the Healthcare system is largely failing because of insurance companies. Burn inhumana and united quacks to the ground 2k24.
Edit: also housing. Fix the housing crisis and the Healthcare system could probably pull through despite the odds. There’s a huge number of homeless people that just live in hospitals, especially psych wards and I’m not even kidding.
Personally, I blame the people telling the lies; e.g. the antivax campaigners, the tobacco companies, etc.
Blame the politicians they own
It’s tough when doctors have been liars too, like those who are hired to push a certain narrative by corporations, or those who participated in unethical studies, or basically all doctors to women saying all our problems are emotional and in our heads while ignoring objective medical facts/symptoms.
When I see how differently men and women are treated in medicine, it’s hard to trust doctors to be objective. They’re just not.
I’m doing my best to be a good little Democrat and look down on those who don’t trust doctors but geeze, experiencing a pregnancy and then giving birth in America makes it real hard to give doctors the benefit of the doubt.
Just wait until you or someone close develops an autoimmune disease, then the trust meter falls off a cliff during round after round of tests and “you’re fine”.
Or if you have a bunion that skews your big toe 35° but they tell you it’s not bad enough for surgery and there’s nothing to be done for it.
Or…yeah we could be here all day just for the system’s failings for me and my wife.
And there’s our lack of or inadequate mental health coverage and care.
The tobacco companies? Telling lies? Why I never!
What’s next, Kellogg shouldn’t be advertising sugar for breakfast for kids?
We will always have liars about literally everything you cannot blame the liars for being successful fix the system that let them defeat truth.
You absolutely can, and should, hold liars accountable. The “don’t hate the player, hate the game” excuse simply doesn’t fly for everything.
Any system capable of countering a determined attempt to spread misinformation would by design attach penalties to such lies, and those penalties would be enforced on the liars. What successful fix could even be proposed that withholds blame?
Penalising liars seems a lot like suppression of opinions that’s a very dangerous route to take. An most educated independent thinkers dont fall for most lies. So maybe fix the american education system and that should solve this problem pretty well. Blame them for being cunts sure but punishing makes unfiltered speech dangerous.
From a non-American’s perspective, I think part of the mistrust comes from Americans have been through high-profile lies perpetrated by government agencies.
For example, a more recent one in the last few decades is the Food Pyramid/MyPlate that was/is promoted by the US government’s agriculture department. This has led to Americans in the late '70s/early '80s to start a war on saturated fat and cholesterol, and the rapid adoption of carbohydrates in the average diet. What has happened in the decades following is a rapid increase in metabolic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and mental illnesses — all of which were rare in human history prior to the '70s. While I’m glad Americans are waking up to the realisation of the mass brainwashing of what constitutes “healthy” food, I’m still upset that — due to the influence of America on the global stage — my own country has followed suit in adopting the US’s dietary guidelines to the detriment of our own health.
And that’s just one example.
The most glaring generator of mistrust for decades now is the thing citizens discuss all the time but is never addressed: our out of control military budget.
We could solve every one of our country’s financial issues multiple times over by reducing the military budget, and not even drastically so.
Our military was tasked with an audit to reign in waste and spending. They couldn’t pass an audit so they were just given a free pass, no penalties or repercussions. The first audit was 2017 and they failed to pass. They failed two more since then. Senator Sanders intoruduced a bill in 2021 and again in 2023 which required an audit and was supposed to impose penalties for failure, it’s been introduced so we’ll see how that goes.
Tbh I wouldn’t mind it if it wasn’t purely combat focused, one of very few paths out of poverty, and if most of that budget wasn’t going straight to Boeing Lockheed and Northrup.
Having an option for young adults to live in a structured environment, maybe learn some trade skills, and most importantly have to learn to deal with other humans would give a lot of people a much needed leg up on their psychosocial development during that early adulthood. I also think it would do it better than the current college experience (especially for little shit rich kids but I’ll get to that).
I say this because I firmly believe a lot of people need a terrible first job as a young adult to finish calibrating their sense of adversity and problem solving. Something that’s not going to injure them or abuse them, but that’s juuust vaguely unpleasant enough to teach some distress tolerance without major physical or psychological trauma.
My first real adult job was awful (unfortunately also extremely unsafe, so not good for these purposes) but it really taught me a LOT about… a lot of things really. Conflict management. Situational awareness. Teamwork. How to lead other people in unsafe/crisis situations. Probably more I’m not thinking of. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but I can’t deny that the job made me who I am in a lot of ways that I’m actually really proud of. I still just about piss myself when talking to HR but a little wariness there isn’t exactly unwarranted. It also really hammered home how little management types care about your safety. That translated nicely into the teamwork- I learned quickly that admin can’t be trusted any farther than their lazy asses can walk and at 2:30 AM it’s you and your coworkers and that’s it so you better figure out how to get along with them.
The other thing about it is that it’s not really the poor kids who need it! They’ve probably been working some shit job since they were old enough to legally (and maybe a little before that)! I didn’t really grow up “rich” (especially since the wealth my parents enjoy now is due to them being hella stingy) but I definitely grew up sheltered, and that job definitely fixed my stupid ass.
Thank you for that.
I’ve long thought we need a non-military service branch much like you describe and for much the same resson.
In my experience it isn’t just “rich” kids but anyone that grows up with minimal adversity and exposure to people outside their immediate (sheltered) bubble that are really hard to work alongside. Anyone who hasn’t been told “no” enough to understand the world doesn’t cater to them, really.
a big part of it is how conservatives have a privileged position in the discourse, and since conservatives are predominantly rural they have distruct because rural areas get the worst doctors and other professionals so it affects how they see the professions.
Medical ethics in the US are not and have never been great. A few decades ago, they were bad enough to intentionally infect patients with syphillus (sp?) without their knowledge or consent. Maybe a decade or two ago, doctors were bribed into over prescribing opiates and starting the opiate crisis.
No shit people don’t trust the medical establishment. They may act appropriately most of the time, but that just isn’t good enough to be trustworthy.
I suspect the GOP and gullible citizens have a bigger impact.
Conservatives correctly identify the location of anxiety, but not the source of the issue. So, a mismatch of anxiety over healthcare costs leading to mistrust of healthcare is, like, textbook conservatism.
Take the anxiety over one thing and use it to stoke fears related to that anxiety.
And failure to differentiate that landscape into something requiring more than five bits to represent is classic leftism.
Healthcare costs are ridiculous, and a serious problem. They are following the same pattern as the other “free markets” which government has entered with the provision of money to “help out”. Whenever that happens, costs skyrocket and supply dwindles.
See also: housing, college education
Also, as a separate but equally dangerous problem, the pharmaceutical companies made enormous profits by pushing dangerous (as in, not covered by longitudinal studies and therefore skipping a good chunk of the safety process we use for medicines) MRNA “vaccines” onto our entire population with the help of government agencies. Their combination of enormous profits and political power brings up very serious questions about the set of incentives involved in the political process that brought these not only to market. but into a thousand types of soft tyranny. Generally speaking, nobody had a gun to their head to take these shots, but many people were forced to choose between their career and their bodily autonomy.
But go on. Build your straw men and tear them down instead. Not like we’re playing for enormous stakes or anything here.
All of the issues I listed above are issues a liberal should care about. I myself am a liberal. But I hang out with conservatives because they’re the only ones who will discuss the above problems openly. Leftists these days are lock-step self-censoring to the point they actually believe their own trimmed-down version of their thoughts.
You had me until the part about pushing dangerous vaccines and how bodily autonomy is more important than endangering someone
Guess who’s also tanking the Healthcare system and who’s letting them.
Right. We distrust the rushed-to-market-and-mandatory vaccines because we’re gullible. Totally what that word means.
“Rushed to market” after decades of research and development on that type of vaccine? Do some actual research and not just YouTube and Fox News next time.
Thank you for the demonstration, you may now return to your horse paste
Nah, we have plenty of anti-vaxers up in Canada too.
UK too. Some I’ve met who are old enough to remember life before the polio vaccine and still claim it isn’t needed. It’s purely stupidity.
It’s because it’s a pro profit business that inflates it’s prices in an open market for the insurance companies. This bit of knowledge undermines ALL other truths. No matter how much you try and argue people believe that money is the world’s biggest motivation because they desperately need it and see it being idolized.
Not the reason. Lots of distrust in Europe too, where you can buy a box of paracetamol for just a few euro.
You can also buy tylenol for cheap in america, that’s why it’s a ridiculous example of how health costs have to be inflated to account for the way insurance reimburses which leaves uninsured people SOL but also occasionally leaves insured people SOL if they find some silly little reason not to cover something like they used the brand name instead of the generic or they used injectable vs pill or whatever the fuck else.
You can do that in the US too, but if they give it to you in a hospital the line item charge is much higher.
Places where it’s sold over off the shelf in supermarkets it costs pennies.
It’s also now harder to buy good vinegar in smaller supermarkets. They’ve replaced most of their options with cider vinegar, due to idiots falling for the drink cider vinegar for your health joke.
What’s “good vinegar” and where is it off the shelf? It seems like the vinegar section of my store has gone crazy over the last decade or so, with so much choice. I usually have cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar and rice vinegar for cooking, and distilled for cleaning, but I do t even know what half the choices are
Yup. Whenever medicine is brought to you by the truly free market, it’s not expensive at all.
You can get inserts for shoes, reading glasses, recently hearing aids (props to Biden for deregulating that), knee braces, vitamin supplements, basic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergy stuff, stool softeners, eye drops, prebiotics, probiotics, marijuana, mushroom extracts, sunblock, gauze, adhesive bandages, antibiotic ointments, etc for quite cheap.
All of those things are free market goods.
Things that should be cheap but are priced very expensively are the things that you can’t just buy, but by law require a doctor’s consent along with your own: insulin, psych meds, serious painkillers, vision-correcting lenses, hearing aids until the recent deregulation (again awesome work Biden), x-ray imaging, oral antibiotics, anticoagulants, blood thinners, pulmonary surfactants, etc.
Everything on both of those lists are dirt cheap to produce. But acquiring the first list — the free market ones — is actually cheap for consumers. Acquiring the second list — the ones that cannot be exchanged on the free market — is ridiculously expensive to consumers.
Capitalism is not the problem.
Free market medicine is perfectly fine in the USA. It’s the highly centrally- controlled aspects of medicine in which prices are skyrocketing.
Paracetamol, which we call acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US, is still quite inexpensive.
If it were a prescription-only drug it might still be cheap in generic form, but getting the prescription would cost well over $100
And/or the price gouging of the providers.
Intentional heroin overdose.
The healthcare system isn’t even close to failing. If the country has a problem, it’s that we can keep boomers alive for too long.
