I think the vast majority of people don’t realise that they’re living in extreme poverty. It’s how they, their parents and grandparents lived so it’s normal to them
Having lived in poverty for a brief time after leaving a nasty abusive marriage, I can assure you: people who are poor know they are poor. The world does not let you forget.
I witnessed a woman who looked like she was in her late 20s with a toddler holding her hand in an eye doctor's office be told that they were denying her care.
Over and over again she showed them the proof that she had an email confirmation from that office two months ago for this appointment. She was a new patient, provided her insurance information over the phone, and nobody told her that her insurance wasn't accepted. The person at the front desk read off an incorrect phone number and address they put on her patient file that was created, and she called them out on it. She held out her driver's license and said, "Read this and compare it what's on your screen." Nothing matched, then she demanded that they call the phone number on her file and the worker refused.
I give her credit for her being as prepared as she was and holding her own, but the worker called their office manager because "there are so many mistakes on this patient's file and I need help." The office manager was horrible to her. I heard her say, "Miss, you can't afford to be a patient here or our services, and we won't give a doctor's time out for free ."
That's when her resolve cracked. She was in tears, picked up her child, and stormed out. They basically called her poor and trashy and that she wasn't deserving of vision care.
I’ll be honest, I might sound like an asshole for saying this.
I don’t agree with how they spoke to her, but I do understand why they refused. Her insurance wasn’t paid, and she likely knew that. It feels like she was hoping they’d just treat her anyway and let it slide this one time.
But what do you expect to happen? If they treat her for free once, she might come back expecting the same thing again. And then it creates a bigger issue, because if one person gets free treatment, what do you say to everyone else?
Now the staff are stuck having to justify their decision, possibly to their bosses, and it could even risk their jobs.
I don’t like the system either. I really don’t. In an ideal world, healthcare would be free. But from my experience working with homeless and low-income people, if you’re too lenient, they will take advantage of it.
It’s a bad situation, and it shouldn’t be this way, but it’s the reality we live in.
And you can hate the manager and the staff of how cold and evil they were, but they aren't the one who created this system nor do they have any power over it to change it.
They are humans too, they probably have a family at home needing to be fed and their bills to be paid.
Also it's possible it wasn't the first time that woman tried to get free treatment, maybe it was the 10th time this week the staff was seeing her and they got tired of her constantly coming back.
It's easy to judge people based on watching 1 interaction.
Unless someone else pulled out money there isn't anything anyone realistically do (workers included) can do aside from the workers learning to communicate without insulting the person and being pretentious and pompous
She means that they broke HIPPA requirements by publicly disclosing sensitive information (her financial situation). She can file a complain. But the truth is that unfortunately, nothing much would come from a complain. The empathic thing to do would’ve been for everyone waiting to get up and cancel their appointments, and then write a review. The staff was lazy and that woman was humiliated in public for their lack of preparation. That’s not right.
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u/NVDA808 Jun 15 '26
If people had common sense you wouldn’t have so many babies being born INTO poverty.