Fever, sore throat, full-body aches, migraines...

COVID or am I just fucking dying? I have been to town a lot, so...?

@Jilano I was, yes. However, I have no healthcare insurance or medicare or anything so I'll have to pay out of pocket whatever the tests cost in full, which is like $600.

Could be anything. Get yourself tested ASAP

@Jilano It'd be even more to get to these places...

Sounds like leprosy. Get thee to the apothecary.

Naaaaaah

@halfflat we can't be trusted to put on face masks, doing hivemind healthcare?

@M1sf3t so, as an Indian who recently moved to the US to study...I'm absolutely floored how bad and/or expensive basic stuff is here.

Sure, you have a creaky bureaucratic system. So do we. Which is why you digitise stuff and you provide basic services with transactions etc. run by computers.

I'm legit scared of falling sick here because I'll have to deal with the astronomical costs and then hope that insurance covers it. I've never felt that way before in India, where public government provided healthcare is cheap and tiered by income so that even the poorest of the poor can just walk in and get treatment. (and one step above that, the higher government hospitals, are of excellence quality and dirt cheap for diagnosis, operations, etc., and then you use a private hospital if you need to be admitted for care). You can literally get a consultation for the same price as a (large) bag of chips and it'll be legit. Everything but rare medicines are dirt cheap too from government (and private) pharmacies and they're of excellent quality.

Of course our system has issues (crowding, connectivity etc.) but price and quality of consultation are not among those.

And low level corruption and bUrEauCraCy is way worse in India, because it's a developing country with trash per capita GDP. And besides, every country has dealt with widespread corruption, the US can't be a special snowflake.

Nah man, it's not the bureaucracy that's the problem, it's the policymaking. This is absolutely, legitimately pathetic. This place feels incredibly backwards for a lot of things (of course, it has its bright sides too).