America's Health Insurance Hell
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stories from China, Iraq, Pakistan and Russia and the cost of breaking bones in America. Healthcare is a very hot issue in the US race for the Democratic presidential nominee. Bernie Sanders is promising to roll out government-run health insurance for everyone. When Laura Trevelyan broke her wrist, she found navigating the US insurance system both pricey and confusing.
Health concerns of a different kind are making headlines this week as the Coronavirus spreads to more countries and claims more lives. Determined to cut the number of new infections, China has confined hundreds of millions of people to their homes. Kerry Allen from BBC Monitoring has immersed herself in Chinese cyberspace to gauge the national mood and the authorities response to the crisis.
In Iraq, despite pleas from the Ministry of Health to remain at home, earlier this week demonstrators were still in the streets. Protests have rocked the country since October in response to widespread corruption, poor infrastructure and perceived Iranian intervention in Iraq's internal affairs. Colin Freeman who first visited Iraq 17 years ago has been back to meet an old friend.
In the Pakistani city of Lahore, a building where nationalists once staged meetings against British rule, is slowly crumbling away. Andrew Whitehead recently managed to make his way in to the decaying Bradlaugh Hall and caught an echo of Lahore’s tempestuous past and at times troubled present.
Wrangel Island was one of the last refuges for woolly mammoths. Today the Russian island is home to Arctic foxes, polar bears, and is visited by more than a hundred species of migratory birds. Scientists flock there too but why honeymooners asks Juliet Rix?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good morning. |
| 0:06.1 | Today, falling ill is not just a personal problem |
| 0:09.6 | as the coronavirus test civic freedoms, |
| 0:12.4 | travel plans, and in China cyberspace. |
| 0:16.3 | We gaze at a relic of colonial times in Pakistan, abandoned to rust and rubbish. We return to Iraq an occasion for whiskey and |
| 0:25.2 | reminiscence and the frozen Arctic landscape once roamed by woolly mammoths. |
| 0:31.1 | Why not have your honeymoon there? |
| 0:34.0 | First, somewhere in the competition to be nominated to contest the US presidency |
| 0:40.0 | are promises to improve the American health care system. Bernie Sanders wants to |
| 0:44.8 | roll out Medicare nationwide. Joe Biden promises to expand Obamacare, all |
| 0:50.3 | different ways of delivering more health insurance. |
| 0:54.0 | Laura Trevelyan, who broke her wrist a month ago, |
| 0:58.0 | has had a personal and extremely costly experience |
| 1:01.0 | of the US health insurance world. |
| 1:04.0 | So far, my broken wrist has cost me $6,000 and I'm lucky enough to have one of the better health insurance plans out there. |
| 1:12.0 | In the past few weeks weeks I've learned a lot |
| 1:14.4 | about the US health care system. The progressive candidates for the |
| 1:18.3 | Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, say it's in |
| 1:22.4 | crisis and rigged against the hard-working ordinary American. |
| 1:27.0 | The care I've received has been outstanding, but the bureaucracy and the cost has been overwhelming and draining. |
| 1:35.2 | The eye-popping bills began with the surgery. |
... |
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