What is that? Is it filters or something? I thought the CPAP was strictly a machine and that you needed to clean it from time to time. What supplies?
Medical debt does not affect your credit rating in the same way as other kinds of debt, but ignoring it is a bad idea. You can still have your wages garnished, your home might be put under lien, etc. Hospitals have traditionally avoided those tactics, but they are resorting to them more and more these days.
Furthermore, your doctor can simply refuse to see you if you have unpaid bills. If you have any sort of chronic condition - and most likely you eventually will - then not paying your bills can be disastrous. Donât expect the ER to save you. They are only required to stabilize you, which means they wonât do anything to treat diabetes, chronic heart failure, cancer, etc.
Filters, masks, tubes, etc, yeah
The CPAP item that takes the most supplies is the humidifier IMO, not the actual air pumping machine. Depending on how dry/dirty your air is, you may need to be replacing humidifier filters very frequently, or not at all.
Now there is an interesting aspect to CPAP supplies that reflects the underlying idiocy of the American health care system: the durable medical equipment suppliers who provide the actual gear are 3rd party vendors, not part of most peopleâs health insurance. They are very happy to provide you all the supplies you need, and even many supplies you donât, and then bill your insurance out the wazoo. The insurance is very careful about denying these things b/c in the rare event that a CPAP user dies in their sleep, a lawsuit is nigh-inevitable.
So my CPAP supplier actually calls me every month to offer me supplies that I have not requested. When i was new to the supplier, I requested a new mask and they asked me, âdo you need the headgear etc. that goes with it?â: and I said âsureâ. They sent me the mask, headcare, replacement filters for a humidifier I do not use, plus a bunch of other stuff that I donât even know what it is, since I have never used it. Then they billed my insurance company quite heftily, over $1,000 IIRC.
Fortunately I have no co-pay or deductible for DME, but if I did, that inoccuous âsureâ would have cost me a grand.
That sounds like the old printer ink scam.
Doctors canât form unions. Itâs illegal.
They can form companies, which they sometimes do in order to have the clout to push back against insurance companies and hospitals, who try to take advantage of everyone, not just patients.
Youâre correct! I guess this is what they do:
âin 2009, Texas became the first state to permit freestanding ERs, facilities independent of hospitals that provide acute care around the clock â and frequently arenât in insurance networks.â
Yeah, there are plenty of those, and a few different large doctor owned companies that contract to fill the actual hospitalâs ED shifts. They arenât hospital employees, which is why the hospital and the doctor may not take the same insurance. And I agree that itâs all needlessly driven by profits and would prefer a single-payer system. And Iâm one of those ED doctors who stands to lose money if single-payer went into effect.
Doctors can certainly form unions if they want to. They can even go on strike.
Itâs not unusual for a health system not to report unpaid bills to the credit bureaus. Most systems, these days, try to be proactive with financial assistance so anyone not able to pay a bill wonât even get that far with it. The specialists bills have more to do with the physicians and insurance than the hospital since the hospital probably doesnât employ the physician⌠they just practice there.
Interesting. Iâve been taught that doctors cannot form unions or strike due to the nature of the work. Guess I was taught wrong on both counts. It does strike me as unethical to strike though, given that patient care could be compromised in the short term, despite the strike you linked being about improving patient care in the longer term. Tricky issue.
Tell that to the fucking giant conglomerate that owns the hospital we had our second kid in, which was in the middle of telling its nurses to fuck off about healthcare benefits (lol) and so flew in scabs from all over the country who had no goddamned idea how to work the hospitalâs systems and so we just hung out as the âsomeone is stealing a baby!â klaxon blared for hours as we lay exhausted from idk fucking giving birth.
Fuck the whole medical industrial complex.
Actually, F our stupid politics for trying to force a market solution to healthcare when inelastic demand means that the market will never work well for health care. Weâve been trying to ram a square peg into a round hole for 50 years, and that has ended up crushing average citizens.
Oh, youâll get no argument from me.
Yay!
The cost, plus who wants to have kids (especially more than one) when the countryâs government is doing everything it can to eliminate all the social and economic progress of last hundred years? It honestly doesnât surprise me at all.
And the idiots currently at the helm want to actually reduce the number of people allowed in legally every year by half, thanks to some wishful thinking about magically goosing our birthrate of the âright sort of peopleâ (no doubt through some Lebensborn-style program).
Lack of a legal right to paid parental leave canât help either.
Only three states give paid paternal leave! Itâs horrible.
I was grateful to live in NJ for the birth of my first child!