My ten-year old daughter broke her wrist badly while playing outside a restaurant in Buenos Aires, where my family and I were eating with some friends.
Our experiences dealing with a health care system in which we had no insurance and an intermediate level of Spanish was positively illuminating in terms of illustrating how broken things are in the US.
Our first trip to the public hospital emergency room, via ambulance, was completely free (this included x-rays, local anesthesia, wrist setting, a specialist...). Our second visit visit two days later due to swelling issues, this time to a private hospital, cost a grand total of $56.
Follow me below the fold to hear first hand how it feels to participate in a health care system that works.
After my daughter Zoe's accident, the restaurant called an ambulance, the police came (not sure why), and I tried to communicate with them that although Zoe's wrist was bad, normally we wouldn't use an ambulance in the United States to transport her to a hospital. The restaurant insisted and said that they would pay for it.
Because we had no insurance and voiced no preference for a hospital, we were taken to the local public children's hospital called Hospital de Niños.
We entered the hospital through the back door of the emergency room that was packed to the gills. They sent us for an x-ray pronto, called a specialist who took a half an hour to materialize, we discussed options for setting the fracture, proceeded with local anesthesia, set the fracture, casted the wrist, and received another x-ray all in the space of about one and a half to two hours -- monumentally faster than it would have been in the States.
Having said that, I do believe that we received the benefit of special treatment since we were clueless foreigners, especially when you consider that the public hospital’s waiting room was filled to bursting with a more ethnic concentration of people than you usually see in Buenos Aires, which happens to be a very white city.
General Impressions of Hospital de Niños: There was a vendor selling panchos (hot dogs) in the waiting area...Zoe’s cast is old school plaster (good for signing)...the bathrooms were not clean and had no toilet paper, soap, or paper towels...no one ever mentioned payment at any time...we never once filled out a single piece of paperwork outside of telling staff Zoe’s name and her age.
Our next foray into the medical community came 2 days later after Zoe's arm and hand became dramatically swollen. She literally couldn't sleep and she looked as if she had purple Michelin Man fingers coming out of her plaster cast.
We set off for one of the nicest and most well-equipped private hospitals in Buenos Aires called El Sanatorio de la Trinidad, where we were seen by a doctor who concurred that Zoe’s purple digits were not natural. While there, my daughter had another x-ray, which confirmed the fracture hadn't moved and that the alignment accomplished by the Hospital de Niños was perfect.
To free Zoe's swollen hand, Zoe had her cast sawed open around her hand and a big strip cut down the side of the cast, which was then pried apart to make room for her expanding flesh. The full-arm plaster cast remained though.
General Impressions of El Sanatorio de la Trinidad: It was a very modern hospital with excellent facilities. We filled out no paperwork, we only had to tell them our name, address, telephone number and Zoe's passport number. The cost was $40 for the doctor's visit and $16 for the x-rays. We were in and out of an emergency room in less than one and a half hours.
To have my daughter experience a horrific fracture in a foreign country and to have had the medical establishment be a help instead of a hindrance was refreshing, to say the least!