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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> people who had no health insurance but still got health care

This is a harmful myth. It's possible to get emergency care under pretty much any conditions. Everything else isn't available.

You can use this trick if you got hit by a truck or had a big infection. It doesn't work to get a hip replacement, or chemo, or post-stroke occupational therapy, or a prosthetic, or a pacemaker, or...

That stuff requires insurance. You need to stop telling your friends that fraud is the answer and start telling them to sign up for care.

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I was referring to 'extreme' health care incidents. I don't consider it fraud if a person has their back against the wall fighting for their life, and on top of that is dealing with a system that prefers surgery to stem cell injections because of the extra operating room hours that it can bill. Just my personal interpretation.

And my point was that "extreme" health care incidents represent only a small part of treatments needed, and that people NEED INSURANCE, not to be told "it's OK, you can just not pay".

Your point about "fraud" is just a nitpick over a moral vs. legal definition of the term, and it too isn't helping anyone live a happy life.

Get. Insurance.

Believe it or not, even with the ACA, not everyone can afford it. $150 a month is too much if you're making 15K a year, or around that number + you have children. If I was still in that income bracket when the ACA came out I would have simply had to take the fine and have it wipe my tax return because there was really no other way.

Then the proper advice becomes "get your ass out there and vote for a party that will preserve and protect your access to health care" and not "hur, dur, it's all good, you don't have to pay!"

My ex mother in law was a lazy, morbidly obese dependent of the state who received well over a million USD in care during the last 10 years of her life. Even when her moron of a husband cancelled their insurance policy she still managed to spend months in the critical ICU section of UC Irvine while they cut out a bread loaf-sized section of necrotic flesh and rebuilt her intestinal tract. They didn't, and couldn't, pay anything.

She received care, without insurance, for heart failure(including oxygen concentrator and tanks), a pulmonary embolism, and back pains(among other things which I can't fully recall and am actively trying to forget).

I'm not saying it happens to everyone, but it does happen.

i don't see anything here that contradicts the parent.

which is to say, preventative and maintenance care are important, and i don't see any of that in what you described. parent's talking about emergency care. you're describing emergency care.

> you're describing emergency care

Everything is emergency care, if you wait long enough.

She did generally have good access to preventative care once she had a condition. Since she generally always had something wrong with her, she generally always had access. I see your point though.

I'll also say that people like her are why preventative care isn't always what it's cracked up to be. There are plenty of people like her with conditions like diabetes(which she also developed due to her sedentary lifestyle and poor eating habits) who willfully disregard their doctors' attempts at moderating their behaviors.

> good access to preventative care once she had a condition

That is literally the opposite of what "preventative care" means.

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