Originally Posted by
WHBM
Indeed. I saw an extraordinary complex piece of US protective medical equipment shown as for a victim who had arrived there. I did feel that if they did not have sufficient medical insurance one would not have seen the supplier for dust ..
The expensive equipment you saw was likely the ISOPOD they used to transport the first 2019-nCoV case in Washington State:
Not only did they use the ISOPOD, they put the patient into one of the two beds in their isolation ward and sent in their one and only robot to treat him. As you can probably guess, ISOPODS and high-tech isolation wards are few and far between, no less so in the US than anywhere else in the Western world. Treatment robots are in even shorter supply.
If and when an outbreak even remotely of the scale of what's happening in Wuhan develops here in the US, facilities and personnel will be utterly overwhelmed. There's not enough of anything, anywhere. There may be a very few individuals whose wealth is adequate to avoid the queues and command scarce resources, but merely having good health insurance won't be enough. No one will get what doesn't exist.
As far as access to care, the the law requires hospitals to treat patients who arrive at an emergency room, at least to the extent required to stabilize them, without regard to ability to pay. So, in that setting, it's pretty much a matter of first-come and most critical, first served. Of course, patients who are admitted but don't have good coverage or lots of money (hardly anyone has
that much money) will be financially ruined, for years or decades, when the bills arrive.
And many won't be admitted, regardless of coverage, because there won't be adequate space, beds, other facilities, medical staff, lab techs . . .