A big part of that is that other countries view to medical staff as a fixed cost. They’re not reflected in the “bill”, much like how you don’t get billed by the fire department. They’re simply paid to be there, and costs for treatment are more reflective of the cost of the treatment.

It’s complicated, because it’s American healthcare.

The hospital charges $200k. The insurance agrees to pay a negotiated discounted rate of $100k. $75k goes to the various insurance plans of the doctors and hospital. $15k goes to the people providing care and materials costs (everything is itemized, so then $50 aspirin you see is because it includes the time of the pharmacy tech who got the order, entered it into the system and checked for interactions, the tech who filled the order, the pharmacist who had to sign off on it, and the nurse who carried it to the patient.). $10k goes to the hospital as profit.
The insurance then makes the patient pay their $5000 deductible, which is what you pay before the insurance you pay for pays for anything, then the patient pays their $2500 coinsurance, which is what you pay after the insurance you pay for starts to pay for things but they only pay for half. After that the insurance covers it. The “perk” is that having met your deductible and coinsurance costs you likely have to pay little or nothing for care for the rest of the calendar year, making January to most financially responsible time to have a medical emergency.

In terms of actual “cost”, I think the biggest difference is the itemization of everything. Universal healthcare is intrinsically more cost efficient, but it still has to pay doctors and nurses. When that cost is viewed as part of the cost of running a hospital as opposed to part of the service “charged” to the patient it can bring the “list price” down a lot. You end up with the price of a broken arm being the cost to treat a broken arm, not then cost to treat a broken arm and have everyone involved show up and your share of building the hospital room, and the cost of the janitor cleaning the room.

It’s time entirely likely they never actually paid anything out of their own pocket. Situations like this are awfully common, so hospitals pretty easily mark a bill as in legal dispute and move on while it gets sorted.

Part of the horrible cycle is that bills are high to cover costs while bills are disputed, which makes them more likely to be disputed.

It’s less to avoid situations like this and more to avoid the stresses of travel and having something come up in a situation where medical care might not be available, or leaving you far away from your usual care team, or in a situation where you have a very fresh baby and you live 5000 miles away, which can make for a very rough trip home or a difficult recovery in a faraway place.

It’s actually the same in the US. Misery increases the birthrate.

Our birthrate is higher because we traditionally have had a higher immigration rate from countries with higher birthrates.

I had someone indignantly think I was making a racist joke when I said algebra came from the middle east.
I had a tricky time explaining that no, I’m not joking about the word sounding Arabic, it’s actually derived from Arabic and I was earnestly sharing a fact.

Their heart, if not their head, was in the right place at least.

I would never advocate or incite for imminent lawless action. I would advocate for a change in public policy that included things currently held to be illegal.
As long as it makes a difference, the first amendment protects your right to advocate for changes to law and policy. You just can’t tell people to right now go and break a specific law if you have reason to believe they might.

“People should shoot maga fascists dead in the street and hang them from lampposts” is protected because it’s saying what society should do, not actively calling for people to go do this.

Also in the sense of literally trying to outlaw Christmas. The Bible doesn’t describe a Christmas festival and celebration, so many Christians felt that it was improper and unchristian for a very long time.

In the US the only real war on Christmas was fought by Christians. The soviets, the CCP and briefly the French revolutionaries are the only times atheists have actually pushed against it. The Nazis were in favor of a pro-nazi version of Christmas that was more about the state.

Tit for tat is a good tactic, usually. There is something to be said for a chilling effect, or “intimidation”, as a way to not just punish current behavior but to forestall future escalation. The only key is that it needs to be selective, and not permanent, and then extremely reversed when they switch to cooperation.

They preach hate, you destroy their landscaping and signage. They remove your memorial and you burn down their building.
Meanwhile you praise the episcopal church and very visibly support fundraisers by the united Methodist Church.

It only alienates the people who were already too far gone. Others will tut at the disproportionate response but agree to the middle ground of “it’s self defense, so it’s justified in principle”.

Gotta shift the center somehow.

While money is used to by goods and services, it isn’t those goods and services. It’s essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

People don’t go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they’ll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it’s cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there’s intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There’s also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren’t relevant to this.

To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it’s given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn’t cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

That being said, while they can’t solve it they’re certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we’d be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
One person doesn’t have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn’t exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.

Given that most of the comment thread was about if the lawsuit was justified or not, you can understand how a sudden shift to systemic justice and the morality of corporations might be a little unexpected.

So it sounds like you’re saying the people who have been hurt shouldn’t recoup their damages, since that just stalls the continued fucking over without consequences, and instead they should… Let them get away with it, embrace getting fucked over, and take the consequences of the company onto themselves? The exact same outcome, except the corporation has even fewer costs?

You’re talking systemic change. A lawsuit doesn’t need to cause systemic change to be worth it for the person who was wronged.

The justice system isn’t always about correcting grand social inequities. Sometimes it’s literally just conflict resolution and balancing things out. If I break my neighbor’s fence, the judge isn’t going to try to bankrupt me or have me give money as a punishment to keep me from breaking other fences. They’re going to have me pay for fixing my neighbors fence because that’s what’s fair.

If your goal is to hurt the business, there are certainly better ways than the justice system. If your goal is for them to pay for the damage they did, the justice system is pretty much the only game in town.

That doesn’t really sound like an argument that it’s frivolous, it sounds like an argument about why the company shouldn’t need to pay much. What if the onions weren’t obvious? I don’t know if they put their onions in a sauce, in the bun or something else.

It’s entirely plausible that lifting the bun would have revealed the onions, even most likely. I wouldn’t, however, say that the concept of difficult to spot onions is so unreasonable as to say the case is frivolous.

I’d be curious why you think it’s frivolous. Why shouldn’t people use a lawsuit when another hurts them? The civil court system is literally there for disagreements and “you hurt me, make it right”.

Just for the record, other people haven’t necessarily seen other comments you’ve made. Acting indignant about that is frustrating.

What’s callous indifference is the company having an attitude that allergy safety is too much work, not thinking you should vote with you wallet.

A lawsuit is part of voting with your wallet. More specifically, giving them a financial incentive to take food safety more seriously.

I seriously doubt the guy is going to go back to either restaurant, so voting with his wallet and not giving them money for a burger is done, and likely doesn’t cover the costs he incurred as a result of their error.

When is a lawsuit appropriate if not after a business decides to cut corners and hurts you?

What argument do you think the lawyers would make? A food establishment is supposed to be able to safely handle food. He requested food without an ingredient for health reasons and they agreed. Then they failed at food handling and he got sick.

It’s a civil case, so the result can be a divided share of the blame. Something also tells me that they won’t want to make the argument “no reasonable person would have any expectations that we got their order right”.

Having a lawyer on retainer doesn’t mean you’re going to win, it just means you expect enough lawsuits to justify it. Recall the “absurd” McDonald’s hot coffee case that 1) they lost despite having a lot of lawyers, and 2) wasn’t absurd except through the lens of our society tending to label anyone suing a company as some combination of foolish and greedy.

And that’s why it’s fair to sue them. What you’re describing is callous indifference to the well-being of others that has caused demonstrative harm.

I think everyone agrees on what the fast food place is thinking. The issue is that that line of reasoning is dangerous and has legal penalties.

Think of it with “hand washing” and “fecal coliform bacteria” instead. “It’s too expensive to train our workers to wash their hands after pooping, and most wouldn’t anyway because we don’t pay them enough to care” just isn’t a defense when someone gets sick as a result.

I’ve been told it ranges from “it’s a quick pinch”, through “that’s just the way it is” to “we could give a numbing shot, but it would be just as uncomfortable and make this take longer so there’s no point”.

As a man looking in from the outside, women’s reproductive healthcare has a level of dismissiveness around pain that makes the dumbest machismo look quaint. There’s the male doctors who just dismiss women’s pain, and the female doctors who know and just “that’s how it is” it. And then the one 50 year old obstetrics doctor in the country who understands the balance of “childbirth intrinsically hurts” and “we can manage the hell out of pain if we actually do our jobs” who gets to enter a room for 30 seconds, implicitly convey that they’re a saint and perfect human being and then immediately get paged to perform emergency surgery for a car accident involving multiple pregnant women, at least in our experience.

That last bit is the only exaggeration. I’m sure there’s actually two or three doctors like her per state. The rest is true.

Dismissiveness towards women’s pain is upsettingly common in healthcare. From plain old sexism (a woman’s 7/10 is a mans 4/10 because women are sensitive) to women’s symptoms manifesting differently than men’s (women’s heart attacks don’t present the same as men’s, and differences in abdominal anatomy means there’s more ways for pain to mask itself as coming from somewhere else.), the end result is that I can’t think of a women I know and have talked to about it who hasn’t laughingly referenced a doctor dismissing their pain and ordering a pregnancy test.

Depends on what you think it represents.

It’s traditionally a symbol of opportunity, or new start style liberty.

America has, for a long time, been a place of hope or opportunity for immigrants. Not necessarily welcome, kindness, or prosperity, but hope.

With the visibly growing xenophobia this has tragically waned, but even still we have some of the highest immigration rates in the world.

He does, but it can also be things like reputation damage or “the fascists stopped paying for my song because they thought it was gay”.