I'm close to the point of just giving up and moving to a safer country with proper health care.

[hunter]

84. My wife and I had actual job offers when we were young...

... New Zealand, Canada, etc., with easy paths to citizenship.

We stayed because those jobs were a long way from California where our parents and most of our siblings lived.

Years later we started to get slammed around by the kind of medical problems that randomly fall out of the sky, resulting in $100,000 medical bills that supposedly good insurance only partially covers. My wife ran one COBRA to the bitter end. There was no way we could have paid for her chemo ourselves, but fortunately she was accepted to our state's high risk insurance pool just days before her next treatment was due. It all worked out, the medicine worked, but it nearly bankrupt us.

The United States is not a civilized nation. Our "health care system" is an incredibly stressful thing to navigate. I think many very ill people, those who don't have strong advocates, simply give up and die. It almost feels as if the system is designed that way.

The situation with mental health care is even worse.

Obamacare improved the situation, but I believe the Deplorables, the Social Darwinists, and certain Christians are holding us back from further progress. The deplorable don't want "their" taxes paying for the medical care of people they hate, people they hate for racist, religious, or political reasons. The Social Darwinist don't want to "waste" money on people who are not "productive" by their evil standards. Certain Christians believe you wouldn't be sick if their cruel and capricious god favored you, or maybe that he's giving you some kind of test to make you stronger or purify your soul for heaven should you die. These Christians also love to wash themselves of their sins (and sometimes enrich themselves) with their charity. Damn them all.

Many nations have better health care systems than we do. To civilize and improve the U.S.A. health care system we have many proven systems from around the world to choose from. But maybe that's another thing that stands in the way of progress -- U.S. American Exceptionalism, the belief that somehow we're different than the rest of the world in some special way. God Bless America.