What I learned about US healthcare when my kid was injured abroad
When our family planned a three-month summer abroad, we congratulated ourselves on our preparedness: We’d fully checked off our packing lists, purchased public transit tickets in advance, and invested in a last-minute travel insurance policy?just in case. What we hadn’t prepared ourselves for was actually having to use that insurance plan. But then on the night of the 4th of July in Cologne, Germany, my six-year-old daughter fell in her sleep from a second-story loft bed and suffered a fractured skull, traumatic brain injury, and broken clavicle.
Experiencing her injury in a foreign country was an education I never dreamed I’d get during our time abroad, and one that showed me just how disparate two nations’ hospital systems could be. I first realized that things would be quite different in Germany when the ambulance reached our apartment and the emergency department doctor himself stepped out of the vehicle. There on the street he performed his initial assessment. Once he determined my daughter had broken her ?Schädelbase,? the base of her skull, we knew we were headed for the hospital. Even in the haze of my terror, I actually felt thankful, that someone so qualified was already involved in her care.
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