“Jennifer Sontag cracked her skull and couldn’t afford emergency brain surgery. Her doctors suggested she start a GoFundMe,” Kelly Kasulis Cho writes over at The Washington Post. “”‘”Their advice was, “You’ve got to get the surgery. You’ll work it out later,”‘ she said. “And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? Your advice to someone in a medical crisis is to beg for money?’” Sontag, 52, was teaching business management in China in 2019 when she fell while exiting a bus and hit her head so hard that it caused a leak of cerebral fluid in her brain. She spent five days in a hospital in Shanghai before her worried family persuaded her to get the necessary surgery close to them in St. Louis. Her hospital bill in China came out to roughly $1,300, she said. In Missouri, she negotiated the price of her operation down to about $100,000, resigning herself to a life of medical debt. Sontag, an entrepreneur who for years owned clothing boutiques in St. Louis and Kansas City, had moved to China largely because she had become fed up with the U.S. health care system. A decade before her fall, in the United States, she married her boyfriend ‘purely to get health insurance,’ she said, because she was already struggling to afford care for Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel condition. Within a year of getting married, she suffered a ruptured bowel, had emergency surgery and was saddled with some $20,000 in medical bills. She eventually filed for bankruptcy, unable to afford the costs as her illness stopped her from working. ‘Even with his medical insurance, the co-pays and deductibles were so high that we still could not keep up,’ she said. Years later, the couple divorced, and Sontag said she knew she had ‘no other options’ but to leave the United States. Sontag is part of a small and largely unstudied group of Americans who have decided to leave the United States permanently because of their concerns over health care costs. They’ve instead chosen countries with socialized medicine, universal health care coverage or lower medical costs.” Kelly Kasulis Cho, “Fed up with U.S. health care costs, these Americans moved abroad,” The Washington Post.
