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Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
111–120 of 381 posts
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#112Interesting: > For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found. I wonder how they'd count me, who puts all expenses on a credit card and pays it off each month, technically I'm going into debt ...
I wonder how they consider my family who receives bogus bills that are being mishandled by insurance or the hospital or both.
Yeah I was going to say, I would be 0% surprised if I had old outstanding medical bills somewhere just because of the general chaos of the process. I have plenty of cash to pay whatever I owe, it's just a low-visibility clusterfuck.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#113Still better than dealing with rationing. The rest of the world better hope the US never goes socialist with health care - kiss innovation goodbye.
idk. Most innovation in the field of medicine comes from research in universities, which are pretty socialized for the most part. The workers that are doing the innovation are also educated in a mostly socialized learning system. And there are plenty of economies with mostly socialized medicine that do plenty of innovation (including the USA). So I think your fears of collective funding of important institutions are unfounded.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#114Just watched John Q (2002) last night, and can't believe that despite all the attention it gets, nothing has changed at all. Can't say I'm surprised though.
Basically the way things work in the US is that even if you can get an overwhelming majority of people to agree that something is a problem, you will never get them to agree on a solution.
In this instance, the two proposed solutions are: make healthcare the government's responsibility like many countries that don't have this problem, or do nothing because that solution isn't perfect.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#115not that it honestly matters. the whole cabal of private healthcare has become such a teetering house of cards post covid that credit reporting agencies no longer count medical debt in your score. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/medical-debt...
My wife had a decent chunk of medical debt when we got married which was long before COVID. Even at that time medical debt didn't count terribly against her. Maybe a 10 pt drop in her score. And eventually the debt fell off her credit.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#116> Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated.
I'm not sure what sort of retirement they had planned to have on less than 10k, but it looks like in this case the hospital knew they could afford to pay but preferred not to. When people use number of jobs rather than hours worked per week it's typically beacuse number of jobs is greater than one and hours is less than forty.
> Ariane Buck, a young father in Arizona who sells health insurance, couldn’t make an appointment with his doctor for a dangerous intestinal infection because the office said he had outstanding bills.
The emergency room was available to him. What was the total he was asked to pay? Why didn't he pay it?
> Allyson Ward and her husband loaded up credit cards, borrowed from relatives, and delayed repaying student loans after the premature birth of their twins left them with $80,000 in debt. Ward, a nurse practitioner, took on extra nursing shifts, working days and nights.
Average nurse practitioner salary 115k. Why are they putting medical debt on credit cards? The emergency room wasn't going to stop care to those kids if they didn't pay immediately. If they were poor the kids would get CHIP, so I think they probably had too high income and maybe decided to forgo health insurance and work as contractors for additional pay. What was the plan for the birth? Was the problem that they were early and they didn't have a chance to get insurance at the last second?
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do all of the medical providers in other nations with universal healthcare have starving families?
The US doesn't have universal healthcare, so there's not a great mechanism for health care workers to earn a living without charging client for it. Some charities excepted.
The money going into medicare is enough to extend coverage to all americans provided the system is run with the cost efficiency of the typical EU healthcare system.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#118Interesting: > For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found. I wonder how they'd count me, who puts all expenses on a credit card and pays it off each month, technically I'm going into debt ...
At worst they'd put you as one of the 37% of people who haven't had to cut spending on food, clothing, or other basics. Of course, 63% of the people with health care debt have (according to study). So while your case is interesting from a technical point of view, it isn't really practically or morally interesting, and can only serve to detract from the important points of the study.
These studies are always self-reporting and taken at much more than they actually say. Checking the methodology is important and should be done more often, especially on surveys based on self-reporting and not on large amounts of data.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#119Interesting: > For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found. I wonder how they'd count me, who puts all expenses on a credit card and pays it off each month, technically I'm going into debt ...
You are assuming $1000 is easy to pay off. This is simply not true for the working poor.
$1000 is $2 / day for les than 2 years (if you can do math unlike commenter below, that's including nearly 20% APR). I'm sorry but even the poor in america can come up with some way to make $14 in a week, if nothing else by picking up some cans.
I live in a city where a segment of impoverished people come up with ways to spend $20+ a day in fentanyl, and they don't seem to have much trouble coming up with that even while living in a tent.
Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt
#120Also known as 100M people who may have died without medical care, but were provided it despite their inability to pay for it. If you remove the ability for medical workers to seek payment for their services, most medical workers are just gonna say fuck it and not work for free. Medical care providers have families they have to feed too.
The alternative isn't denying care. It is providing the same care without having people get into debt, which every other developed country (and a lot of undeveloped countries) in the world manages to do.