Red state voters have voted over and over again to defund access to rural healthcare, ban access to basic women's health, and treat women and health care professionals as criminals for making decisions that prioritize the health of a living woman over an unborn fetus.
Doctors are leaving red states by droves because of all this.
Oh and that whole "gun violence is a mental health problem" they pitch without actually funding or advocating for mental health....
Well enjoy your white male suicide rates.
This is what Republican policy looks like in action.
Dead Americans.
Yup. The two largest towns in the county we were in were struggling to keep their hospitals open. Every so often someone would die and donate a chunk of money to help them, but they have been getting strangled out of being able to offer much. More and more, they were sending people to other places (an hour drive to basically anywhere significant), and if it was anything remotely serious they were basically functioning as helipads to life flight people.
My stepdad's cancer doc would visit one of the hospitals (the better of the two, which still required a 15-20 minute drive) every so often (like every 2-3 months I believe), so could do check-ups there.
Which, this is also why the tech industry is looking to move in and dominate health care as well, as they start to increase what health metrics they can track via wearables and implants, mixed with teleconferencing doctor visits, and then using AI to diagnose stuff. As fucked up as those companies are these days they probably would do better than the current insurance system, especially for early detection. Plus we already have a bunch of services where they pay doctors to sign off to send 20 year olds boner pills, rogaine, and testosterone supplements, where the doctors basically just sign (its basically like how some docs were handing out medical marijuana cards). Which, they talked about that for like remote areas where they never even had the medical infrastructure, but the US is quickly beginning to look like the divide we see in say Africa and other places.
Still, it'd be money better spent than the shitshow that is health insurance industry (that actively intentionally is letting known scammers pretending to be doctors operate and steal millions of dollars via care they didn't even provide; we're talking individual "doctors" doing that level of scam) or the hundreds of billions that's gone to Uber which mostly just put cab companies out of business then jacked up the prices and still has no clue how or if it can ever make money on food delivery (despite it costing more money than delivery used to til these companies fucked it all up - and they claim they're subsidizing the cost even which I don't know if they actually know what subsidizing actually means - if I'm still paying more for a service that isn't actually offering more I'm not being subsidized; they're beginning to offer autonomous car delivery where you have to go out and get your food out of the car and then they act like you're saving so much money because they don't charge you for the tip you put since there's no person to tip...).
This country is so fucked.
Oh, and we didn't even delve into the health care Woodstocks that occur in the South where the poorest go on journeys to make it to some racetrack where doctors donate their service for a weekend where they try to help as many people as they can. This was released in 2013 and things have not improved:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2180503/