Yeah definitely a very different experience. I lived in the urban city with a mostly absent single parent enjoying fine cuisine like ramen and iceberg lettuce - actually pretty good eating! Probably a bit late now, but you can often get free dental and medical treatment at universities! My parent ended up getting cancer (and getting over it) largely through these programs.
Free treatment requires you to be in the right place with the funds to seek treatment though. I lived in an area where most of the free treatment we could get was a decent drive out of town and largely only covered children.
There were no universities near me that offered treatment and believe me, that was one of the first things I tried. You were lucky that you had the opportunity to get that free treatment; an option I didn't have. I'm sorry your parent had to deal with cancer, thankfully that's one way my parents have been lucky so far in.
Why not take a grey hound? I mean I just don't understand this. You can get anywhere in the country for what amounts to a few hours of minimum wage work. I'm damn sure going to be doing that if my teeth were getting to the point that it was becoming a health crisis! This is the thing that confuses me in general. People do have this immense opportunity all around them. But they always find a reason for not doing something. And these reasons never seem particularly compelling.
And there is no reason to be sorry for anything I went through. As bizarre as it is, I would not have had my life any other way and I doubt even my parent would have. No doubt as a part of the cancer it caused them to reevaluate their life and after I had gone off to college they started taking night classes at a community college for nursing, and succeeded and have now worked their way up to very comfortable middle class, starting with little more than a high school degree in their late 30s. Also caused them to catch the Jesus a bit hard, but hey if it completes their life then more power to them.
The public transit in the US is incredibly poor if you're not living in the middle of a large city. Acting like everyone has the opportunity to take a gray hound is rather naive and in my case, again, I didn't have the option nor the funds to do so.
You don't find these reasons compelling because you can't seem to understand that a lot of options are entirely circumstancial. For people that even do have the option to take a bus, you're effectively asking them to lose their job or stop taking care of their family for possibly an entire day. An option a lot of people don't have when they live paycheck to paycheck.
Okay, if I'm naive please enlighten me. Here is how things look from my view here. There are Greyhound stations in literally every single state, and certainly extremely close to near all coastal areas. Stating it's impossible to save up enough to take literally a day off to save your health is something I literally cannot believe. Work 80 hours for a week or two. If you can't get the hours, get a second job. It's not a longterm thing - just enough to get you what you need. What am I missing?
The beautiful thing about this country is that there are practically infinite possibilities and opportunities. Obtaining them can often involve a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears - but they're there. That's the thing that I find frustrating - sayings like 'when opportunity knocks' are idiotic. Opportunity doesn't knock. It's something that must be aggressively sought out, captured, and then chased after once it escapes which it frequently will - like tricky little bastard it is. People seem to believe that others just have things happen for them, or that they were born into fortunate circumstance. In some cases that's true. In the vast majority, it is not. Things are not given, they are taken.
