when reading/watching US media is the completely bizarre approach to healthcare
oh, yeah -- there's another one that's byzantine, and if you're used to byzantine, it doesn't make any more sense to run into a simple system, either! When I was watching the jdrama, in one episode the 5-year old daughter refuses to go to school because her stomach hurts. The father's reaction: "we should go to the hospital, right away!" My reaction to the father's reaction: "talk about totally over-reacting! Why not just call your family doctor?" And then as the show continued and I realized the number of times characters just went directly to the hospital (for things I'd never even consider worthy of hospital visits, like "fell down and scraped knee" and "has a slight fever"), I started thinking, "ahah, so actually it's just that these people are RICH. Gotcha!" (And then I asked CP, who explained a bit more about the system, and I had to totally revise my entire perception of the situation/s. Ehehe.)
While you're getting a kneejerk from scenes where a patient or family member is struggling with hospital paperwork, I get the opposite from UK/EU films -- when we see someone going into the hospital and then cut to obviously very-expensive private (private!!) hospital room, I find myself mentally inserting a scene of patient or family member dealing with paperwork. Like, it's so natural to assume that this headache is mandatory that my brain -- even knowing intellectually that this isn't how it works when the country has, like, real healthcare system -- is just trained from birth that paperwork and insurance and authorizations and primary care physician involvement and all that other crap is absolutely mandatory. My suspension of disbelief ends up completely un-suspended, if I don't do that mental insertion.
(Unless I think about it consciously, and then I think of all the times my father's told me about the healthcare system in Sweden, and I say to myself: "I really really wish I spoke Swedish (and could handle five months of freaking cold and 3-hour daylight!) because I would totally be there just for the national healthcare." Yes, it's true. I have Swedish National Healthcare envy. I'm not proud. I'll admit it.
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Date: 8 Nov 2010 06:35 pm (UTC)oh, yeah -- there's another one that's byzantine, and if you're used to byzantine, it doesn't make any more sense to run into a simple system, either! When I was watching the jdrama, in one episode the 5-year old daughter refuses to go to school because her stomach hurts. The father's reaction: "we should go to the hospital, right away!" My reaction to the father's reaction: "talk about totally over-reacting! Why not just call your family doctor?" And then as the show continued and I realized the number of times characters just went directly to the hospital (for things I'd never even consider worthy of hospital visits, like "fell down and scraped knee" and "has a slight fever"), I started thinking, "ahah, so actually it's just that these people are RICH. Gotcha!" (And then I asked CP, who explained a bit more about the system, and I had to totally revise my entire perception of the situation/s. Ehehe.)
While you're getting a kneejerk from scenes where a patient or family member is struggling with hospital paperwork, I get the opposite from UK/EU films -- when we see someone going into the hospital and then cut to obviously very-expensive private (private!!) hospital room, I find myself mentally inserting a scene of patient or family member dealing with paperwork. Like, it's so natural to assume that this headache is mandatory that my brain -- even knowing intellectually that this isn't how it works when the country has, like, real healthcare system -- is just trained from birth that paperwork and insurance and authorizations and primary care physician involvement and all that other crap is absolutely mandatory. My suspension of disbelief ends up completely un-suspended, if I don't do that mental insertion.
(Unless I think about it consciously, and then I think of all the times my father's told me about the healthcare system in Sweden, and I say to myself: "I really really wish I spoke Swedish (and could handle five months of freaking cold and 3-hour daylight!) because I would totally be there just for the national healthcare." Yes, it's true. I have Swedish National Healthcare envy. I'm not proud. I'll admit it.