Doesn't this debt forgiveness mean the patients are going to be hit with a tax bill for the amount forgiven this year?
US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
191–200 of 349 posts
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Gleevec was probably an order of magnitude cheaper or more for the Polish government than in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/312011/prices-of-gleevec... And doctors in Poland are probably not earning a few hundred thousand USD per year, and similar for nurses wages and all the other people in the healthcare chain. Quick googling shows wages might be an order of magnitude cheaper also. I assume healthc…
>>Yes, the US has some extra administrative costs due to the billing nonsense of non taxpayer funded healthcare and overhead of health insurance companies, but bottom line is healthcare costs more in the US because everyone earns more top to bottom in the US, and supply of healthcare and medicine is constrained. Right, but just like your healthcare professionals are paid an order of magnitude more than ours, you guys…
> Right, but just like your healthcare professionals are paid an order of magnitude more than ours, you guys will be paying an order of magnitude more in taxes and healthcare costs. So I don't think it's an excuse for the level of care provided in the US - yes, it's more expensive, but you also pay more for it, so.....why is the experience worse?
I believe the nuance is in who is paying more in taxes and who is receiving the benefits. This is the distribution of taxes paid by quintile:
https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2019/
The over-arching theme in the US is the lack of political will in voters to enact policies that benefit everyone. And I believe that manifests itself in the messed up systems that we get, which are half assed measures to “help” people, but not really help people. So you end up with a much worse experience in healthcare for half or more of the population, since the goal never was to actually provide them with healthcare, but to give the appearance of it while also minimizing the amount of wealth transfer that happens.
> And I mean, Polish supply of doctors and medicine is massively constrained too, that's by no means a uniquely American problem to have.
I presumed it is less supply constrained due to the lower price point. I know it’s quicker and easier to become a doctor in the UK than the US, but potential doctors in the US may also have better career alternatives.
> I'm sure the deeper legal nouances of legal liabilities are of course not the same, but at least on the surface level it's similar - of course you can sue a hospital for malpractice if it occurs, and you will be awarded damages.
I don’t know enough about this to make any solid claims, but I was just going off the worldwide reputation of the US being more litigious than anywhere else. Also, the healthcare providers’ higher incomes in the US also probably result in bigger liabilities since there is more to gain in a lawsuit.
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#193One of the most unfair characteristics of US healthcare is that if the health insurance company does not cover a claim, then the patient is responsible for the payment. It is unrealistic in practice for a patient to know or understand the process by which claims are made (since they are made by an error prone and disinterested provider administrator, and are made in a non-transparent and highly complex way), and also…
I just changed my insurance to LA Care. The doctor they gave me was with UCLA medical. I called and they said they did not and never have accepted LA Care. I called LA Care. The lady said, "I really wish their clinics stopped doing that." She called the UCLA clinic with me on the line and sorted it out. I was then left to give them the rest of my info... At the last step when they asked for my ID, they insisted it wa…
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Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#194It is very good that hospitals give debts for patients. I live in Uzbekistan and my father has pancreas cancer. There are no good oncologists in my country. I've contacted many hospitals worldwide and most of them asking about 10K USD and we must pay 80% of the bills before they start curing my father and of course I can't afford this amount of money and I have no any option to get it. I am ready to be in debt for any amount if they could try to do smth and make my father's last days a bit better for him.
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
And even if you can contest the denial, it can take days to months to get it back, meanwhile you’re shouldered with the burden of paying full price for your treatment with the _hope_ that they’ll reimburse you later. My fiancée has cancer, and we regularly joke that dealing with insurance companies is worse than the actual stage 3 cancer she has. They constantly deny her coverage for medications she’s been on for yea…
> Medical care should never be tied to personal wealth, period. There is literally no limit to how much effort society can put into one person's healthcare. In the absurd extreme, we could reshape society into doctors, farmers and medical manufacturers in a mad quest for best possible medical care. At some point we have to ration healthcare and decide when to put more resources towards something else. If not personal…
Look at the percentage of GDP that the US spends on healthcare.
Wealth is a terrible proxy for contribution to society.
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Medical care should never be tied to personal wealth, period. There is literally no limit to how much effort society can put into one person's healthcare. In the absurd extreme, we could reshape society into doctors, farmers and medical manufacturers in a mad quest for best possible medical care. At some point we have to ration healthcare and decide when to put more resources towards something else. If not personal…
All good questions, but irrelevant to the point you are refuting. With a public health system, medical care is tied to the country's wealth - not to any individual. In my country, a government body negotiates with the drug companies on behalf of the entire country. That does indeed mean that some drugs are not funded - e.g new cancer drugs can take some time, or maybe never be publicly provided. But what will (should…
> With a public health system, medical care is tied to the country's wealth
This is misleading. In a country with less wealth wages are usually lower, including those of health care provider and so on, making medical care cheaper.
Case in point: Cuba is pretty poor and have excellent medical care.
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you buy your own debt? I assume you can’t actually buy your own debt, only buy debts in aggregate. How can a creditor have any moral claim to $1 when the note traded for 4¢? Does this give me an incentive to purposefully wait until the debt collectors show up, and then offer them 5¢?
yeah, you make them an offer. I've negotiated several debts. Its easy, they usually make it clear what they are willing/able to do. I paid one at 30% and one at 50%.
How bad did your credit score get wrecked?
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't 330M insured people, and many people don't need visit a doctor in a year. (Also, there are ~740M people in Europe, and yet...) Even that link you provided doesn't really back up what you said: "denial rates ranged from 1% to more than 40% across insurers"
The point was there’s a lot of people with a lot of transactions in healthcare happening, so “hearing” about it constantly doesn’t mean anything. And yes, I know the link doesn’t have statistics in erroneous denials of coverage (I couldn’t find it anywhere quickly), but it did note that the law requires insurers to abide by an external reviewer’s decision. Surely if there were that many erroneous denials of coverage,…
I agree that there would be plenty of horror stories to fill the news, even if such events were extremely rare, but multiplied by 300 million.
However, many people's "hearing" is a slightly less biased sample than that. It's that every American they have personally talked to about any visit to a hospital seems to have a horror story about (at very least) crazy bills, hours on the phone with insurers for months to years afterwards, etc. That's also not unbiased since people like telling these stories, but at least the denominator is two digits not seven. (The stories may also not reflect the latest reality, as you say.)
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#199I think there is an important point to be highlighted: We often blame the system for being expensive but in this case an individual doctor was able to say we will not collect. These decisions to charge patients a literal fortune for treatment probably always falls to an individual or small group of individuals. We should highlight this on billing documents, instead of "please pay XYZ hospital" the individual accountable for the largest share of the bill should be named: Dr. X is requesting payment of $500,000.
Re: US doctor forgives $650k in medical bills for cancer patients
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many places there aren't non-covered services on offer. And where there are, a fee schedule is published, publicly, in advance.
> And where there are, a fee schedule is published, publicly, in advance. So you're saying the patient is responsible for the payment when the service is not covered...
> So you're saying the patient is responsible for the payment when the service is not covered...
I'm talking just about my country, but the procedures that aren't covered are in the practical totality of cases elective - things like braces for aesthetical reasons, plastic surgery that is done for vanity reasons (still covered when the lack of it seriously affects your life like burning victims), things like that.