It’s funny because my wife watched Superstore on Netflix recently.
One of the episodes was literally them starting with ‘our deductibles are too high, let’s pool our money’ eventually ending in ‘we’ve recreated insurance’
But it’s still Obama’s fault, right? His name is on it.
This will be no surprise to most of us…we’ve talked at length about the lack of much action on bringing down health care costs in the US, in the ACA or any other policy. But it’s a good article that’s well worth the read on the subject of high costs.
The most important bit, to my mind, is when they talk about the secrecy around price and quality in health care. Make all the information public and things have the potential to change quickly…but that particular freedom in “free market” doesn’t seem to matter to those who keep pushing for market-based health care solutions. (Of course I’d still rather ditch the for-profit market system entirely, but that’s a different discussion.)
It’s also disappointing how little recourse the patient in that story had against the high cost. No initial estimate, no details in explanations from the insurance company or hospital, very little support in the court system. Unsurprising, but still disappointing.
Ugh, yes. After blowing $170 in two specialist visit copays to receive and evaluate results from a home sleep study (the study itself thankfully fell at the end of last year, after my heart attack scare/ER visit, so thankfully it was beyond my deductible and fairly affordable), and then a further $400 for the CPAP machine prescribed, I got wolloped by $450 in extra charges because the specialist was part of a clinic within the hospital and the hospital itself somehow justified an extra charge atop the specialist visit. And that was for about 20 minutes of conversation with a nurse and a sub-doctor of the clinic’s main dude, all told.
So, of course, had my followup visit at the 3 month mark for another 10 minute conversation at a $85 copay, and am now awaiting the $200+ in extra charges for the privilege of walking in there.
But hey, after that and next month’s supply re-fill on my CPAP machine, alongside the physical therapy copays, I’ll be getting close to my deductible for the year. . .
I fucking hate the medical industry. Burn it all to the ground, corrupt motherfuckers.
Yeah, this shit? This is fucking indefensible. It is bullshit of the highest order and should be illegal. Motherfucker you are in the hospital, so don’t bill me as some out of network specialist clinic.
For years now hospitals and doctor’s offices have been merging into mega-conglomerates, healthcare corporations like Tri-Health, which consist of dozens of hospitals and hundreds of medical professional offices around a region. What this has done has flipped the health insurance industry on it’s head.
In the old days, when costs were somewhat realistic, the insurance companies had the power. They negotiated the “discounted rates” with providers like hospitals and your doctor’s office in exchange for funneling their members to those providers. This worked very well for everyone involved. Patients got a fair price, hospitals and doctors were well compensated, and the insurance company could make plenty of money as long as it paid attention to actuarial details to set realistic premiums and continued to sign new members. Then some business folks got the bright idea to start creating “health networks” out of multiple hospitals and providers…and at first it was working great and actually lowering healthcare costs. But of course, as with any business, the idea it to drive impossible growth and maximum profits, and by the 2000’s these networks were getting large enough to start dictating back tot he insurance companies the rates they would pay. “Pay us $XXXX for this service, or we will tell our network of providers to no longer accept your members” became the new power play in healthcare. And here we are today, where a person like the man in the article ends up paying $70,000 for a $30,000 hip replacement because his insurer is powerless to negotiate with his providers.
And the fact is, insurance companies are FINE with this, as it makes them a fortune. Every time healthcare costs go up, it’s not the insurance companies who take the loss. They simply drop the worst risk people and raise the rates on everyone else. Your employer, the government (in the form of lost tax income) and YOU end up shouldering the increases. They’ve even stopped trying to hide this fact at all. Like the article mentioned, a medial supply that costs the hospital $1,500 will be charged back to insurance at $15,000 simply because they can. There is no justification for it, other than “the insurance company will pay it, so why not?!” Money hats for everyone!
Even acting as your own advocate is no longer viable. As an example, my son was recently having a health issue. We went to his pediatrician and they ordered a series of tests. The tests were $700 “retail”. My insurance company, Humana, knocked a paltry $200 off that, leaving me to pick up the $500 difference (thanks to my HDHC plan, the only one my employer offers). Still, that was fine because we needed to know what was going on. The pediatrician referred my son to a specialist. The specialist charged us $300 for an office visit that lasted literally 5 minutes, in which he did noting but ask a couple of questions, listen to my son’s heart, and feel his abdomen. He then ordered more tests. Those tests cost $400, of which my insurance covered $150, leaving me with another $250 bill for tests. Turns out, the tests he ordered were some of the SAME tests the pediatrician had already done, the specialist was just too lazy to review the file and see they were done. When I discovered this, I tried to fight the charges by telling both the provider network and my insurance company that I wasn’t going to pay for duplicate tests. Neither one cared. My insurance company literally said “They tested for the same thing, but because they coded the test charges differently, we allowed it.”. WTF?! So if I sold Humana an apple for $100, and then sold them another apple for another $100, but wrote “Orange” on the receipt, they’d pay it. Fucking ridiculous.
Single Payer Medicare for All cannot come soon enough. VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
EDIT : Oh, and for the curious, in the end his issue went away all by itself, thankfully a week prior to the $3,000 (out of my pocket) diagnostic procedure the specialist wanted to do on him.
It’s your moral obligation to throw your medical bills in the garbage. We’re being exploited.
Again, the solution is to carry insurance and throw away the extra bills. If you want to be extra helpful get a pool of friends to set up a company together and buy each others’ medical debt if possible and then forgive it (tbh, not sure how feasible this is in practice). Don’t submit to being the main course between insurers and the medical system, let them eat each other. They’re holding the forks and knives after all.
If everyone does this the heath care system will be forced to correct itself. Because paying off that $2k - $50k bill they saddle you with isn’t going to.
Even having the ability to pay i’m starting to trash my medical bills. And, strangely, my credit score keeps going up (it’s like 820? now). ?? Fuck routine medical procedures costing several thousand dollars, not to mention the gross incompetence and indifference of a system that routes you to specialists without a single point in the system that actually cares what the underlying problems you have actually are.
Same here! I’m sporting a 800 credit score and I haven’t paid a co-pay in like 5 years. The debt collectors keep sending me scary threats and I throw those away too! Sometimes I use them to start fires in my fire pit out back to cook hot dogs and marshmallows.
Fun story, my wife had a baby and they sent me 2 copay bills for $1000. One for my wife, and one for the baby. See they went into the hospital as one human, and came out as 2 humans, so 2 $1000 copays. I threw them in the garbage! I did the same thing with my 2nd kid. Felt great!
Won’t all these unpaid bills go to collection at some point, then start hitting your credit? Maybe it simply hasn’t happened yet? I find it hard to believe that they’ll just give up on the debt that they feel is rightfully owed. I mean I’m all for fucking the insane medical/insurance industry at this point but I don’t see how this doesn’t bite you in the ass someday.
You threw your second kid into the garbage? I mean, I know they say first born children always get the most attention, but that seems unnecessarily harsh!
;-)
These kids, you think they are innocent; they’re not innocent!
I’m even less sanguine in that i don’t mind paying some of the copay. But this every hospital visit is actually 10 different bills from 10 different specialists is bullshit. I actually almost use it like tipping - if the doctor was crap, i don’t pay (like an ER doc that sees me for 5 minutes, says they can’t help, and then bills me $1000 personally - nope.) If i felt they actually were helpful, sure i’ll pay. If they charge me 10k for an MRI i might pay 1k of it and tell them to fuck off over the rest.
Civil disobedience comes with a price. But as long as you pay your other bills on time, at least to date, it seems like credit agencies separate medical debt from other debt. So tbh the price is essentially 0 so far.
Welcome to fucking emergency rooms. I think Texas is the worst, the largest union for emergency workers in Texas is out of contract with half the insurers (as of a few years ago).
As for the $450 for Armando, there’s two components for procedures, technical and professional. For example if you do an MRI, the hospital bills for the technical (they own the machine) and they get say $4000. The radiologist portion reads the film and writes the report and they bill say $100 (this is the professional component).
We neeeeeeed a national insurance company. We need standards. We have 50 different states each with 50 different insurers with 50 different fucking bullshit plans. There’s no consumer choice is there’s no actual meaningful choices. ANYTIME you see “consumer choice” in a healthplan you are GETTING FUCKED. Unless you’re young and healthy.
I don’t know, I started doing this after I locked up my mortgage 8 years ago. So far, so good. I got a car loan 2 years ago with no problem. The credit solicitations in my mailbox have not stopped. My free credit reports say I’m good with no blemishes. I think maybe the credit agencies know these debts are bullshit and not indicative of your ability to repay a home equity loan.
By any chance was this an echo and a follow-up echo (93306 and 93307)?
Nope, they were tests to check for infection, blood and viruses in the stool. Less than 10 days apart (10 days from the return of results of first set of tests) and all came back negative for infection/virus. I kind of wondered when the sample collection bottles looked exactly the same, down to the color of the caps and the need to refrigerate one of them post-collection.
Ah that’s most likely incompetence rather than greed then (cuz lab money doesn’t go to them).
Oh man, you know what I recently learned that was shocking? The Stark Anti-Referral Laws ONLY APPLY TO MEDICARE. That’s a major WTF. You mean it’s still legal for a physician to refer non-medicare patients to a facility he partially owns? Man…
I wouldn’t have the courage to not pay the bills, but crap we’ve paid close to four grand since November and probably will end up paying another $3-4K before the end of the year - and that’s with insurance.
What I hate is how the bills seem to dribble in. I just had a routine sickness visit when I had the flu back in March, and I’ve thought I paid the entire cost of the visit twice now, and then another bill comes in.