Is America Really That Bad?
Is America Really That Bad?
Been seeing a lot about how the government passes shitty laws, lot of mass shootings and expensive asf health care. I come from a developing nation and we were always told how America is great and whatnot. Are all states is America bad ?
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It's not, but people love to be outraged and will find any reason to be. We have extremely comprehensive media coverage, so anything that can possibly go wrong will definitely be covered in the media, whereas in other countries, you just don't hear about most bad things happening. The media will always twist anything and everything to be as polarizing as possible, as that generates clicks/views. Most of the time when you see things on the internet that make you rage (including here on lemmy), if you look into it deeper, there quite a bit of nuance, and you can see where they were coming from when they did such a thing. But to many people who are perpetually online, they don't care about nuance. Everything is black and white to many people on the internet. Either it makes you happy or it makes you rage, and there is no in-between.
Things that actually do suck:
The mass shootings are absolutely awful and should be taken more seriously.
Healthcare is expensive if you don't have insurance. But most people have decent enough insurance that it isn't a huge deal. For example, my insurance plan has a $2000 out of pocket maximum, so no matter what happens, the most I can ever pay per year is $2000 for my entire family. Plus, most people rarely see a doctor, so it isn't something that affects their daily lives. Kind of an "out of mind" type of thing.
It should be noted here that insurance is tied to your employer. Some employers offer better plans than others. This commenter has an above average plan.
For someone like me who is employed as a contractor (1099) I would be completely fucked on healthcare if I wasn't able to get on my wife's employer's insurance. And it isn't even a good plan.
Healthcare is a huge problem is the US, mainly due to it being privatized instead of government run like most so-called developed nations.
True, I do have an above average plan. At my old job my plan was even better. Probably among the best plans possible. I paid $20 for every doctor visit, $50 for any specialist/ER visit, and never a penny more. But then we got bought out by another company and I basically didn't have insurance anymore. I had an $8000 deductible, which means I needed to spend $8000 in a year before insurance kicked in. This was a number I would never get to. That was the reason I left and found a new job. Which highlights the problems you mentioned with it being tied to employers. Luckily my profession was in-demand at that time (it is not currently), and I was able to find a new new job extremely quickly. If that happened today, I would probably be fucked.
If those are the only two things you think actually suck in the US, you live a privileged life.
At no point did I say this was an exhaustive list.