Posted on 11/17/2013 5:57:44 AM PST by M. Dodge Thomas
Before undergoing an MRI, a CT scan or a surgery to clean up that wobbly knee, consumers had better become accustomed to hearing: "How do you intend to pay for that?"...
The shift comes as more consumers enroll in so-called high-deductible health plans, which require consumers to pay more out of pocket in exchange for lower monthly premiums. As a result, health care providers must collect a larger portion of patient bills from consumers themselves, rather than their insurance companies.
It's a delicate balance for hospitals, which have certain legal and ethical obligations to care for people who arrive with critical health conditions regardless of their ability to pay. At the same time, hospitals believe they must become more insistent and methodical about screening patients' ability to pay, particularly people with scheduled procedures or elective surgeries.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
We need to shame all Obama voters.
I believe the best option is to pay a monthly fee to a hospital network directly, to have access to facilities, there can be different levels of service, based on the amount you wish to pay. There can be competing plans, so that will tend to keep prices low. The difference is, now the middle man, the insurance companies, are eliminated, and you are not limited to the plans your employer offers, in fact, it totally decouples health care concerns from employment.
And that can be supplemented with Catastrophic health insurance, that pays for more expensive care.
Sounds reasonable.
Entrenched interests and beaurocratic entanglements will ensure that nothing reasonable will happen.
Great question.
The real issue has its roots in WWII. Manufacturers needed employees, there were wage and price controls, but not benefits controls. So to attract workers, corporations offered employee health insurance. This was tax deductible to the corporation, a tax advantage an individual does not get.
This “stuck” after WWII and over time, paying for medical events became something that your insurance company did, an insurance company the individual didn’t even hire - the insurance came from the workplace. Thus, buying insurance and paying for medical events was something corporate HR did, thus creating a disconnect between the consumer of services and the payer for those services.
Until that key disconnect is removed, say by HSAs and high-deductible individual policies, we won’t be seeing much in the way of greater transparency and market-based pricing.
Thanks for the elaboration!
I agree with what you wrote.
James, there is justification for the $350. The machines are quite expensive. The wages of the technician must be paid, as well as general overhead for the building, utilities, support services, taxes, yada, yada.
The $2500 is to support insurance company and goobermint bureaucracies, and let's not forget, for medical care for the indigent. Including the illegal alien parasites sucking our lifeblood so they can send remittances "home".
Seems like everyone in US should just stop buying health insurance. Deal in cash
Obama voters have no shame.
The patient is going to ask, “How much will that cost me”? The hospital will respond, “How much is your deductible”?
The low information patients will be very surprised when they first learn about deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance.
That became an Obamacare talking point though plans that dropped coverage during a covered illness usually get sued and lose.
They can look it up. All electronically cross-referenced now and the information is usually included on the referral from your PP. When you wake up from anesthesia they will know who your insurer is. If you are brought into the hospital unconscious they will get your ID from your wallet and find it that way.
However, once in a while you can still use that strategy like the other day when I paid cash for an Rx at a different pharmacy because it would have cost more at my regular pharmacy under the insurance plan.
No asset tests anymore for under-65 Medicaid (not sure about older).
I am aware of the talking point bullshit, but I still say: I am not aware of that actually happening. When you get diagnosed with an illness during a policy period, THAT policy is on that illness…..
The Dr. was probably wearing his love gloves...
Brief hospitalization and 3 night stay. Bills I got totaled 66k. 4k left on a 6k deductible. Paid my bills to get to the 4k. Leaving, theoretically, 62k in billing? It looks from what we can tell the insurance company paid something like a total of $2700 out of the 62k. End of story.
So, in a situation like that--you are damned. You want to reach the deductible to know, mentally, you are done paying for it. At the same time, you are the only fool paying for much of anything.
The hospital charges reflect the ‘stiffing’ they get, the staggering number of uninsured patients they have to treat, those who don’t pay their co-pays (per the topic of this thread), and lawsuits. In DC almost all the local hospitals (vs. university hospitals) closed over the past 20 years because the critical mass of uninsured patients had been met and surpassed. I understand LA has a similar problem
Congress passed legislation requiring hospitals to treat anyone who shows up in the ER. Go spend a Friday night at your local ER. Abuse beyond comprehension. Private facilities that do x-rays/CT scans/MRI’s, etc. are not affected by that same onerous burden.
Unfortunately, the thievery starts with the patients.
So it is legal to cancel non-grandfathered policies of sick people under a doctor's treatment, thus letting the old insurer off the hook?
http://attorneypages.com/hot/health-net-insurance-cancellation.htm
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24164007/
consumers had better become accustomed to hearing: “How do you intend to pay for that?”...
Most of us have been hearing if for a lifetime the minute we walked into a hospital, especially if you didn’t have a welfare, get out of “jail” free card. Welcome to the real world, welfare cheats.
Well those two sources, very liberal sources, are about specific cases that I don’t know enough about specifically. You are dealing in California, where the regulations on insurers are the toughest, making it almost impossible to make a profit probably.
So I’m not sure WTF you’re trying to prove here ,but the California insurance market has been so perverted by government for 50 years, that it is not even representative of a private market.
But I would like to know WTF you are trying to prove…..so what is it?
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