Land where calling an ambulance is first step to bankruptcy

The Guardian | 4th November 2003 | Julian Borger

[Az Joe]

So let me get this staight.

The hospital industry and the insurance companies don't want to make money, they want to spend their time calling old people in the middle of the night and forcing them into bankruptcy?

I had no idea.

[friendly]

Pure socialist agit-prop (neo Stalinist propaganda).

No mention of how the US rat party fights every effort by the Republicans to expand private health insurance to cover the general populace, no mention of how most ERs/hospitals are being utterly bankrupted by illegal invaders (oops I meant "immigrants"), and no mention of how the rat party's major financiers, Trial Lawyers Inc., are destroying access to care and sending costs to the moon (or perhaps Uranus)!

(/rant)

[glock rocks]

What's your opinion, Taff?

[oh8eleven]

...the hospital owners, a Christian, non-profit foundation, have hounded her for crushing bills she could not afford, partly because as an uninsured patient she had been charged double.
And for all these years I always thought it was hospital policy to charge double for those of us WITH insurance.

[Billthedrill]

The hospital went after him rather than the insurer and the bills eventually forced the 61-year-old into bankruptcy. He had to sell his house and cashed in his life insurance.

Something smells a little here. You don't lose your house in bankruptcy.

[DannyTN]

In Tennessee you only get to keep $5000-7000 equity in your home. I don't know where she is from.

[riri]

Lesson here, call from cell from down the street from house, pretend you barely speak English, give fake name to hospital administration. Something like Candelaria Martinez.

[Pearls Before Swine]

There is a problem, even if this article is biased towards the socialist solution. No one in this country knows what medical care really costs or ought to cost because of all of the cost shifting and side dealing that goes on. One of the things I remember that Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises said about socialism is that, as an economic system, it has to fail because there is no way to calculate costs and therefore resources are massively misallocated.

In the US, there are all sorts of prices--different ones for insurance companies that cut deals, different ones for government programs like Medicare, and vastly higher "list prices." If you have to pay list price because you are not in a special group, you are screwed!

That said, in countries with completely socialized single payer systems, the situation isn't much different on a societal level, but it is different on a personal level. Because the government medical bureaus centrally mandate all prices, there is no competition. There is massive misallocation of resources, and the country's medical capital (hospitals, trained doctors, pharmaceutical innovations) is slowly bled down and not really kept up. This results in poor medical care, and the rationing of care, but unless you are rich enough to completely buck the system--say by going to the private wing of an American hospital--you don't notice, because everyone is in the same boat.

Here, medicine is largely, but not totally socialized. As a consequence, it is all f**ked up, but it hits some people much harder than others, because they may fall in and out of a socialized, protected group--as by losing their employer-paid health insurance. Since the medical business isn't totally controlled, there is still innovation and profit seeking. However, it is obvious to a lot of talented young people that being a lawyer, or even a dentist, is a better deal than being a doctor.

Another rant item for me concerns the issue of pharmaceutical pricing. The US government limits patent rights for drug companies due to the long and inefficient FDA drug approval process. Therefore, the drug companies have to charge very high prices to recoup their investments before the generics take over. Embarassed, the more opportunistic state governments claim that they can best serve their citizens by buying the marginal production of the harried drug companies' marginal international production in Canada or Mexico. And, Bush taxes us to give away AIDS drugs, thereby shortening their effective useful life span.

No, things aren't good in the UK, but we're not such a great medical model for the world either.

[DannyTN]

My wife had surgery recently. The surgery would have cost her $5000 had she not been insured. But it only cost the insurance company $2000, because the insurance company had negotiated rates. How is that possibly fair that when an insurance company pays for a surgery they only pay 40% of what a person who doesn't have insurance pays?

The insurance industry has so tilted rates, that you are required to buy insurance just to be able to afford care. You can't afford to go it alone, because they do charge you double. That's not right.

There are anti-trust laws on the books that ought to address this, but nobody is enforcing them.

[glock rocks]

However, it is obvious to a lot of talented young people that being a lawyer, or even a dentist, is a better deal than being a doctor.

the lawyer racket is driving many doctors to the wall with malpractice insurance costs. parasites killing the golden goose of the best medical system there is (and soon to be was). tort reform would go a long way towards saving our health care before the devout hillarycare marxists truly get latched onto it.

[glock rocks]

What's your opinion, Taff?

[Agnes Heep]

In Britain you can't get health care, but it is free.

[friendly]

Bump for a major truth detector. Glock does indeed rock!

[friendly]

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it is free!

[strongbow]

Happy to hear you could find a surgeon who accepts less than half his usual and customary fees. Speaking for this surgeon I could not do that and pay my overhead. Hope your wife had a good outcome. When I get to the point of continuing practice or being forced to accept 40% of my fees I will begin my retirement.

[DannyTN]

No we had insurance.

The point is that all health care providers raise their usual and customary fees because there are so many networks that negotiate rates to be 60% of usual and customary.

thus if you need $1000 you charge $1700, so you can get a decent rate from the network. Then Joe Uninsured comes in and he gets socked for $1700 for something that should have only cost $1000.

A surgery should cost the same regardless of who is paying.

[DannyTN]

The other thing that I think is wrong is the way we pay for people who can't pay.

I'm not opposed to helping out with care for the poor and indigent. I am opposed to paying for illegal aliens.

But if the surgery cost $1000. But 50% of the people can't pay. Then they charge $2000 to those who can.

That's wrong. If the government is going to make healtcare providers provide free care, then the government should pick up the tab for those individuals, not the next person needing care.

[snopercod]

A surgery should cost the same regardless of who is paying.

You can thank the feds, who forced hospitals to provide services regardless of the patients' ability to pay.

At our local hospital where my wife works, over half of the "customers" do not pay. The paying customers pick up the slack.

Also, the paying customers are allowed to pay $10 per month on a $50,000 surgery, with no interest charges.

Even more absurd, they don't offer a discount for cash up front.

[strongbow]

I would love to get the same fees from every patient regardless of his ability to pay. I frequently lower or eliminate certain fees to allow older or uninsured patients to afford my care. Yet my confiscatory masters in Washington don't credit me that when it comes time to pay taxes. Those taxes then go to further socialized medical care to lower my fees even further. Loved the ending to Atlas Shrugged, many in medical care are tempted to do the same. This is not Britain where a fellow with twelve to fourteen years of post high school sacrifice and sweat will work for a pittance.