Woman's son suffering mystery illness. Pleads for help from the community. (1:48 is when he's shown)

Please understand I'm not trying to be rude. This whole arrangement makes me very angry and it's difficult to be objective.

Last year a friend of mine died in March because the Affordable Care Act didn't kick in til January. He was, weirdly, the kind of person we're supposed to idolize here -- worked two jobs and was using the money to start his own business; all computer-networking related -- and he essentially had no health insurance. He'd spent all his money in about August of the previous year on a bunch of tests at a very good hospital and they had come up with "we don't know." I suspect they thought he was a drug addict, as he was very thin, but he was thin all his life, even when we met as kids at a science camp at the local science museum. He just got thinner and thinner, but he started from thin, so it wasn't so striking.

He was afraid to buy insurance because it probably wouldn't do any good, as any problem he might have would be a pre-existing condition. Then, in January, the ACA kicked in and he immediately went out and bought very good insurance (he'd saved up) and went straight to the emergency room, where he stayed until they told him he had bowel cancer which had metastasized and mostly destroyed his liver. I don't think he ever got out of the hospital after that.

I'm not sure what she could do with an internet diagnosis, but the absurd lengths we have to go to to accomplish anything in our system here are to be ashamed of.

I've had pretty serious dental problems that have accumulated over the last ten years, mostly broken crowns and missing fillings, work that was done last time I had insurance in the late nineties. I took care of this by going to a local dentists for a free estimate, taking that information (the inventory of work that needed doing) to a Mexican dentist, and then driving across the border and getting everything done at once in about two weeks. $15,000 worth of work cost me $2500, including the hotel stay. They gave me the estimate ahead of time so they could offer me a line of credit, a very lucrative enterprise.

You hear about people who are told after being turned down by their insurance company for treatment that they should "have a fundraising drive" or something similar. It's often impossible to find out ahead of time what something will cost, and the disparity between hospitals can be absurd, $3,000 at one place and $50,000 at another. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

Honestly it's madness.

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