They’re trying SO HARD to make it look like a fringe, extremist position instead of the groundswell of righteous fury that it is.

To my knowledge, I don’t think you have to have a membership to get food at Costco. I’m pretty sure the optical shop and pharmacy are available to non-members as well.

There’s obviously mark-ups at a stadium. I was offering an explanation for why the water bottle was more than the fountain drink, relatively speaking.

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Tap water is supposed to be free in most places in the USA.

To be fair, those are 100% beef hotdogs that they sell at a loss. There’s a reason someone suggested increasing the price despite being met with threats of violence from the CEO (president?) in response for that suggestion.

Most of the time, you’re paying for packaging and shipping of a product. The soda is likely out of a fountain, so the cost is just the cup, minuscule amount of syrup, and some tap water that was run through a cooler/carbonation system.

That’s one of the ways that Aldi keeps their prices down. The packaging is frustratingly crappy and the supposedly resealable bags and whatnot frequently fall apart when you open them. This is mildly irksome, but is easily fixed with a binder clip or some reusable silicone bags which I think is a fair exchange for a 30-50% discount from name-brand grocery stores. (The food itself is very nearly or exactly the same as name-brand foods.)

This is true and the healthcare access problem is more than just cost. If you’re an hour and a half away from any specialists, then the ER you went to likely doesn’t have access to set up those referrals. I have worked in both metropolitan and rural medical systems, and the biggest problems in rural healthcare are almost always access-based. If a hospital/ER is not in the same medical group as a specialist, they can’t put in emergency referrals to that specialist, and I have worked in rural hospitals that don’t even always have imaging services available. There’s an MRI on a trailer that gets brought around to the various hospitals in the group meaning that each hospital has one day a week or one day every other week where an MRI is available. The other option a small, rural ER has is to call EMS to transfer you to another hospital with more resources, but if your insurance doesn’t like the reason they give, you end up on the hook for that 90 minute ambulance ride. Small community hospitals are really between a rock and a hard place when it comes to connecting patients with resources while trying to avoid unnecessary expenses.

The best advice I have for anyone in a rural area with poor healthcare access is to establish care with a family physician for primary care because, most of the time, the primary care physician is the one that actually gets to the bottom of things or coordinates the referrals for specialists. If you have a standing relationship with a physician, it’s a lot easier to make an appointment and they have a baseline to work from as opposed to starting from scratch like an ER physician has to.

Unfortunately, a solid diagnosis can be really hard to find and there are a lot of diseases and conditions that require more testing than can be completed in the ER. Part of why the ER is expensive is because the tests they do get come back almost immediately, but they very rarely order the tests that take a long time anyways. Expediency and staffing are the main contributors to the cost of emergency care.

With the example of your case, how would the ER get you the diagnosis of a food intolerance without spending weeks on an elimination diet? There are some allergies that can be tested for, but that testing involves injecting a sample of the offending agent under the skin and watching to see if it causes irritation… but allergies and food intolerances are not the same thing and the only way to test for food intolerances is an elimination diet. For the allergy testing, the ER doesn’t have the samples to do the subcutaneous injections. It’s really only allergy specialists that have those available.

I’m very sorry that you went through that. I know it sucks with the American healthcare $ystem, but you are always allowed to seek a second opinion and any provider that is opposed to that is a bad provider and you shouldn’t see them again anyways.

One thing to keep in mind about the ER though, is that they’re there to rule out anything that is going to kill you quickly, and if you didn’t lose enough blood to drop your hemoglobin count (a measure of how many red blood cells you have), it is perfectly within the standard of care for them to discharge you and tell you to follow up with your primary care physician or a specialist. The ER has a lot of resources, but not enough resources to fully diagnose every possible problem. They can make sure you’re not on death’s doorstep, and stabilize you if you are, but beyond that, they’re pretty strapped for resources and staffing which make it hard to fully work up every mystery diagnosis.

Painless hematuria (blood in the urine without pain when peeing) is one of the first (and frequently only) signs of bladder cancer. Especially if it’s frank blood (meaning that you can see it without a microscope).

Don’t feel bad about that! There are no stupid questions when it comes to your health and it’s important to ask someone who can give you accurate answers (and there’s no one better to ask than your own physician that you have a relationship with).

Screening means termination of non viable fetuses or carrying to stillbirth. Gene therapy is only available for one disease in humans and it isn’t a fetal anomaly. There are malformations that are not compatible with life that are random chance and not something you can predict through genetic analysis.

In America, the leading cause of death of pregnant women is intimate partner homicide. The 2 most lethal times in an abusive relationship are when the victim is trying to leave or the victim is pregnant.

Many women are pressured or coerced into unprotected sex by male partners and most courts wouldn’t prosecute those cases as rape because the woman eventually “consented” under browbeating and duress.

The majority of abortions are sought by women who already have children and are not able to afford or to care for another child and the pregnancy was unplanned. Many other abortions are for serious health problems with the mother or the fetus. Functionally no one is getting abortions as birth control or “recreationally”. It is an unpleasant procedure and women who go through with it do so for important, valid reasons, and your beliefs have no place getting between a woman and the physician caring for her.

I was saying that abstinence and sterilization are not valid answers to this question as they are unreasonable to expect of people.

They are legally not allowed to strike. They would be fired immediately for dereliction of their position. It’s part of the negotiation when they take a federal job.

I unfortunately attend a religious university for medical school (not by choice, mind you), so I am quite familiar with the mindset displayed here from people with substantially better education.

I have a friend who is a TSA agent and he’s a lovely and intelligent person. He took the job because it was the best thing available to him and federal jobs (usually) come with very good benefits and health coverage. He hadn’t seen a doctor for about 6 years before he got the job because his insurance and PTO was so terrible at his last job.

They aren’t allowed to strike.