most are still stuck in the loyalty type mentality buffered by things like patriotism and national anthems and flags for any event with >5 people and a TV camera.
50 years ago people had the same loyalty towards their companies, and look where that got US manufacturing workers. nowadays you'd be nuts to expect to stick with a company for 10 years. get yours and get out: others be damned.
so it shall be with citizenship. as more and more citizens have more and more power to up and leave, or work outside the confines of the US without too much hassle, questions such as "what on earth are we still doing here?" will be asked, at first in whispers (as they are now), later in louder volumes.
Last time I went to the ER I got an itemized bill in a week for $300 or so.
All medical imaging I've had done has had pricing given up front showing what they where going to bill the insurance company and what the insurance company was going to pay and what I'd have to pay.
My non-emergency visits have a $40 copay up front.
Conjecture is silly when there's good data to be had.
The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States:
> "medical expenses"[0]
The average amount charged for an ER visit in the United States:
> between 2008 and 2017, the average price of hospital ER visits rose 135 percent, from $393 to $924[1]
The cost of an ambulance ride in the United States:
> $164/mile[2]
And make sure to compound the monetary cost with the cost of people avoiding medical care out of fear and unknowns surrounding the actual monetary cost.
It needs to be fixed, but a $900 average that includes $200 charges for a $25 "medical boot" and charges for a $30 bandaid sounds like it may be not too hard to reduce costs across the entire board.
If the average ER visit was 5K of unknown miscellaneous charges than that would indicate nationwide maliciousness on the part of nearly all hospitals. If only a small # of hospitals are engaging in that level of unfair billing, then they can possibly be investigated one by one.
It is the same thing as "we have thousands servers that are crashing at random multiple times a day" versus "we have a bunch of servers that are low on RAM, and a couple servers that crash 5 times a day."
Neither scenario is good to be in, but it is possible to get a hand on the latter scenario, while in the first scenario a "burn it all down and rewrite" fix might be appropriate.
50 years ago people had the same loyalty towards their companies, and look where that got US manufacturing workers. nowadays you'd be nuts to expect to stick with a company for 10 years. get yours and get out: others be damned.
so it shall be with citizenship. as more and more citizens have more and more power to up and leave, or work outside the confines of the US without too much hassle, questions such as "what on earth are we still doing here?" will be asked, at first in whispers (as they are now), later in louder volumes.
where things go from there, anyone knows.