this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
402 points (95.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35822 readers
1583 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I’m Canadian. And I’m already sorry for asking an ignorant question.

I know you have to pay for hospital visits in the states. I know lower economic status can come with lower access to birth control and sex education. But then, how do they afford to give birth? Do people ever avoid hospital visits because they don’t feel like they can’t afford it?

Do hospitals put people on a payment plan? Is it possible to give birth and not pay if you don’t have the means? How does it work in the states?

How does it all work?

Again. Canadian. And sorry.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 62 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do people ever avoid hospital visits

At least in my experience, we’ll generally be able to go to the hospital

Do hospitals put people on a payment plan

Generally, I’ve just seen the debt transferred to a debt collection agency afterwards, since there’s no money for them to take. They’ll harass you, and it affects your credit score, but they can’t send you to jail

[–] Diprount_Tomato@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Credit score? Is it like the Chinese social credit system?

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 64 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yeah, just the American version

It affects where you can rent housing, what houses you can buy, whether you can get a car, etc

[–] Diprount_Tomato@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Love how everyone went insane with the social credit score while you got the same shit done to you and no one batted an eye

[–] plz1@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

US credit score won't get you sent to jail or a re-education camp, at least. At least, not yet.

[–] Powerpoint@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It can impact everything in your life, even jobs and housing now. It's practically the same thing except instead of being forced to live in a camp you're living on the street.

[–] tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

And if you dare get together with other people that are forced onto the street and make a camp together somewhere isolated, the government tears it down and evicts you and destroys your things. Thank god for our freedom.

[–] Diprount_Tomato@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It will condem you to poverty tho, which may be even worse than jail

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

My favorite part is when one of the three companies that does ours leaked all of our data with relatively no consequences.

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement

[–] Arbiter@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Well if it’s the free market abusing us it’s okay. That’s just freedom.

[–] hamsammy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean it's not like your credit score immediately gets affected for something like jaywalking though.

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure that's entirely the bar we should be aiming for

[–] misanthropy@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

It can even impact being hired for jobs. Low credit score? You might be untrustworthy or motivated to steal

[–] Gigan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not comparable at all. In the US your credit score only goes down if you borrow money and don't pay it back. If you get a loan and pay it back on time your credit score will be fine.

I'm not super familiar with the Chinese credit system, but I think it's effected by a lot more. What kind of products you buy, how much you work, posting certain content online, etc.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Yes these systems are not in any way whatsoever comparable to each other except in being reputation rating systems.

“What? A bank wants to know if you defaulted on the last loan you took? What is this?? Totalitarian China???”

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not only American. We in Germany have shit like that and most other European nations have it as well afaik

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It exists in most places from what I can tell, but the specific implementation may differ

[–] jantin@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between

"when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that" in Europe (at least my country) and

"credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you're screwed if it's bad because half of everything runs on credit".

[–] boblin@infosec.pub 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's also the fact that credit rating agencies in North America have hardly any supervision and are prone to make mistakes because they take correlated data by face value.

[–] Jamie@jamie.moe 1 points 1 year ago

I think my credit report still says I work at "DOMINOES" after like 5 years of not being there. It doesn't effect anything, but I get mild amusement out of it being misspelled on top of that.

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't have a credit score, and have never had a problem renting. It's getting a mortgage that I can't do without a partner who's been consistently paying off a credit card for decades.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My credit score wasn’t good enough, so I had to show the last place I rented 6 months of my employers payments to rent

I’ve never missed a payment, nor do I have any debt. I just don’t exist in the system enough to rent

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

The US version is a system that calculates the risk of loaning money vs being paid back. In order to be approved for a loan the credit score is used to evaluate whether or not it is likely to be paid back within the terms of the loan. As a result those with bad credit have trouble getting favorable terms for cars, housing and basically anything that can't be purchased outright. Does it negatively affect people for things outside of their control and perpetuate cycles of poverty? Absolutely, but it is based in actual fiscal risk to calculate sustainable loan practices.

China on the other hand took the US term of "credit" and abused the everloving shit out of it to punish people that the government dislikes. Did your cousin post a Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh meme? Well too bad that you were shopping for a house, because your "credit" is no longer high enough to not be homeless. You should have thought of that before you were related to someone who disagreed with the government!

Not being able to demonstrate to a bank that you are financially reliable enough to pay back a loan is unfortunate, but a rational reason for an unfavorable interest rate or denial of a loan. Making people ineligible for even renting an apartment that is within their financial means because the dictator in charge dislikes you is a completely different thing altogether.

[–] AttackPanda@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago

It’s similar but only take into account financial and professional information. As I understand it, the Chinese version also covers your daily activities.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As the name hints, a credit score is used to rate the risk of making you a loan. It’s not some essential personal ID. It only comes into play if you are applying for credit and is a set of shared records that financial institutions and private companies use to decide if loaning you money is a good risk or not.

Someone else said it’s used to decide if you can get a car and that’s not accurate. If you need to borrow money to buy a car, your credit history will be checked. It’s the loan, not the car.

Is it crazy that lenders would want to know if you’ve walked away from your bills in the past? Making it sound like dystopian China is a gross exaggeration.

Landlords want to know if you will be able to pay rent and they may ask to know what you earn, what’s in your bank account, and if you have insane debt. It’s not credit per se but they are entering into a financial agreement with you which you could default on, so it’s got many of the same characteristics. Don’t want to give all this information? Don’t. It’s not required by law. Not everyone demands it. Some may choose not to rent to you without it.

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 3 points 1 year ago

Not really. It just keeps track of how often you miss your credit card payments so creditors will know how high of a risk you are to lend money to. If affects if you can get loans and what interest rates you can get on loans. But if you just pay your loans/credit card bills, you'll be fine.

[–] Powerpoint@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

At this point, pretty much

[–] Uranium3006@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yes, but in the classically American fashion we only care about money so much only the money stuff even goes into calculating it

[–] xenspidey@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

Well yeah, because it's only used when talking about loaning money...

[–] moistclump@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Would a hospital ever refuse you care if you have outstanding bills or hospital bills with collections?

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

It’s illegal in the Emergency Room. Anywhere else they can. Poor people end up relying on Emergency care, ignoring bills, and the hospitals write it off as “charity care,” which helps them justify their non-profit status, when they’re non-profits

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

Depends on the severity of the issue.

For a life threatening emergency, no

For like pain relief, yes

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

The hospital must stabilize you and save your life from immediate danger. They don't have to make you better or solve the problem.