The $163 emergency room visit

While traveling across Europe recently, Sovereign Man’s CEO (Viktorija) became quite ill and needed some urgent medical treatment.

First, she’s doing fine, and we’re grateful for that. Second, it’s not COVID.

I know that in the collective mind of most of the world, and for especially public health experts, no other disease exists except for COVID.

In the US, for example, CDC data on influenza show that, in a ‘normal year’ (2019, for example), the hospitalization rate for patients with influenza is around 65 per 100,000 people.

But, miraculously, in 2020/2021, the hospitalization rate for influenza dropped 99%, down to just 0.8 patients per 100,000 people.

Do these people actually expect anyone to take this data seriously? Are we honestly supposed to believe that they managed to virtually eradicate the flu?

Or is it possible that, maybe just maybe, the hospital system is counting influenza cases as COVID? Perhaps all that government COVID data isn’t as accurate as they claim.

Anyhow I digress– back to our CEO. She started feeling some terrible abdominal pain last week that persisted for several days. On Tuesday she was in such bad shape that I urged her to go to the Emergency Room.

She’s presently visiting family in Lithuania, so she went to the best private clinic in the country, located just outside of the capital city of Vilnius.

When she video called me a few hours later to check in, she was hooked up to an IV in a private room, clearly feeling much better. But she admitted to me that she was concerned about how much the bill would be.

She had been undoubtedly scarred by a medical procedure in the US several years ago where the hospital bill rang up to more than $150,000, and she was terrified the clinic in Lithuania would charge her the same.

“Relax,” I told her, “it’s probably going to be a couple of thousand euros.”

We were both wrong. The total bill for her Emergency Room visit was 140 euros… about $163 at today’s exchange rate.

We write a lot in this column about the importance of having a Plan B, and specifically the importance of having a second passport or residency.

The idea is to ensure that, no matter what happens, you and your family will always have another place to go. It’s the ultimate insurance policy.

And just like a flood or fire insurance policy that covers your house, you hope you’ll never have to use it. But you’ll damn glad you have it in case the worst ever happens.

Unlike a fire or flood insurance policy, however, having a second residency or citizenship is an insurance policy that can provide a lot of extra benefits.

As Viktorija’s case shows, one of those benefits might be access to inexpensive, high quality medical care.

She tells us all about her experiences in today’s podcast, as well as the “beautiful mess” of vaccine passports that’s breaking out across Europe.

In Lithuania right now, for example, there are plenty of businesses standing up to vaccine passports, insisting that they’ll continue to serve unvaccinated customers.

She also tells us about how she recently traveled through an airport in Europe where no one was wearing masks.

It’s a great story– you can listen in here.