Five or six years ago, my parents traveled through Las Vega when my dad started to feel really sick. This was so atypical (the man hardly is ever sick), that they decided to go to a hospital.
What happened there was beyond belief.
My dad was pushed into a wheelchair as soon as he entered the ER — imagine that he fell and broke a leg in the hospital, and that his lawyer would sue !! — and then a nurse asked him some questions. Next, after a couple of hours, an MD passed by and listened to my dad’s heart and lungs with a stethoscope on his sweater, without even letting him undress.
And that was it.
The bill: $1000, without any real medical examination whatsoever. No X-rays taken. Nada. He had to head back to Europe to find out what was going in (for a fraction of the American bill) 🙄
In an other American instance, one of my best friends was diagnosed with cancer in his early eighties, and doubted for a long while if he would choose to be treated or not. He had a young daughter, and didn’t want to financially strain her future.
I am not sure how his Only in America procrastination influenced the outcome of his condition —
But let’s just say he isn’t among us anymore …
SOURCES: A case of the intrapulmonary spread of recurrent respiratory papillomatosis with malignant transformation, American Journal of Medical Sciences 350 (2015), 55–57. (Attribution: NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International)
