I’ll let the video speak for itself…
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RAM guy is I believe a Brit. Amazing guy to help fellow humans. Not only dental, medical as well.
I’ve seen several RAM help actions in the 'richest country on the planet’.
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In fairness, it isn’t right to lay the blame entirely on Trump. The problem with the ‘For Profit’ medical care system in the US being beyond the financial means of many ordinary Americans has been growing for decades. Part of the problem is caused by the US being such a litigious society that medical practitioners have to pay very large insurance premiums to protect themselves against malpractice lawsuits, and this cost is then passed onto the patients. Another factor is the tripartite cartel operated between the insurance companies, doctors and dentists, and drug companies that keeps prices artificially high.
Basically the US healthcare system is a big business that is run for profit, and like any other business, the prices tend to be governed by what the market will stand rather than what things are actually worth.
Obama made a start to making healthcare affordable, but there are many vested interests with huge lobbying budgets that really do not want the system changed.
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I think also that part of the problem is that the US is pathalogically afraid of socialism ; which they appear to confuse with Communism; & are therefore afraid of paying for somebody else…at least this is generally the case amongst the Americans I know.
“Every man for himself” seems to have replaced “In God we trust”
Agree, as I have said before the US system is quite broken. Not all doctors are complicit though and even those that are find themselves spending more and more time trying to get insurance payments for their patients’ treatment.
A lot of the anti-conventional medicine rhetoric on the 'net (big pharma, evil doctors etc) originates in the US and - viewed in the frame of their system there - it has a degree of merit, the huge downside is that it allows quack medicine to flourish.
One aspect of this is that the real prize in “opening up the NHS” is not so much profit opportunities from delivering heathcare as it is in weakening NHS price controls (in the interest of “transparency”) - the NHS spends a good amount of time negotiating prices with US drug companies and is usually sucessful at bargaining them down - we pay a fraction of the price that US health providers pay for drugs. Other countries then use NHS prices as a benchmark in their own negotiations.
Forcing UK drug prices up would massively increase profits for US pharma.
I feel so sorry for these people.
I have experienced US health care, both for me personally and for my family.
I had a very good insurance, so financially I survived, the cost for 2 of us ended some over $600,000+ . Still I had to spend hours having phone meetings/call with hospital and or DR office, Insurance company and a person who job was to sort out who-pays-what. Twice I tried to crack a joke with a DR and a nurse. Both stayed away from me after that: later I figured out they where afraid of being sued.
Anyway, I have an endless supply of jaw-dropping memories from US health care.
Regardless of all the reasons - watching the vid was like watching something from a 3rd World country - not the richest (?) on the planet.
Once you get away from the big cities and the Interstate Highways, what you find is a lot of poverty along the way of the old State Routes. The commonly found image of the majority of people being middle class or above is certainly not the case in a very large part of the USA. Take a drive from Virginia to Louisiana via The Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (about 1,200 miles) and you’ll see what I mean. There are a very great many people living in Trailer Parks (mobile homes), the guy in front of you at the petrol station is only buying $5 worth of petrol for his rather ancient and battered vehicle, and at the supermarket checkout you will find just as many people paying with food stamps as are using a credit card.
There are indeed many well off to wealthy people in the USA, but for every one of them there are also a thousand poor ones.
Trump didn’t cause this state of affairs, but rather was elected precisely because this state of things has existed for so long. The American poor felt abandoned and neglected by both the Democrat and Republican main stream politicians and that is why they elected someone who was not a politician to be their President.
I would agree with you on that point Bob.
Also there is a widely held belief that the Federal Government is so inept and corrupt that it would be sheer folly to entrust them with running a centralised health service of the type found in the UK or France.
Last night I heard on the Hard Talk programme on the World Service, Valerie Jarrett from the Democratic Party saying that 43% of the electorate in the USA did not vote.
Absolutely astonishing and frightening that so few people in the USA are sufficiently engaged to care who is their President and the Leader of the Free World.
I think the size of the gap between the richest and the poorest, and the respective numbers of them, in any society shows how backward, corrupt and ‘third-world’ it is, using that yardstick the USA doesn’t come out well.
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For many Americans the make up of the Federal Govt in Washington, and which individual happens to be President, are really quite immaterial as these factors are not seen as influencing their daily lives at all.
With the jealously guarded system of ‘State’s Rights’ it is the State Legislatures and the State Governor who are the real power holders and law makers in the USA, and it is at that level of politics that more Americans have interest. Who gets elected to the ‘School Board’ is relevant to their lives, but who the President is ------ well it doesn’t really matter that much.
As for the President being the Leader of the Free World, that is a title more often bestowed by Europeans than by Americans, a very great many of whom couldn’t name the countries if you showed them a map of Europe that didn’t have the names already on it. My mother-in-law on one occasion told a fellow member of the Washington Republican Women’s Bridge Club that her daughter was moving to live in Europe, and the immediate reply was “Really ? What country is that in ?”
America is odd, once you accept that it’s not such a bad place.
Maybe many of them don’t think of the USA as being the Leader of the Free World, but the reality is that they are because they have the largest free economy.
As for being ‘odd’, at tge moment they are dangerous.
You cannot view the US through the eyes of a European.
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What eyes should we use? 
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Found this TED program that describes the pricing of healthcare well.
I was charged $4000 for a test (I was able to reduce it to a couple of hundred), so this happened to me too.
The only conclusion that you can reach is that quite a lot of US healthcare is effectively corrupt