Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
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Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#2Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#3Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.
Just give consumers access to a price list before service is provided. That will go a long way towards helping the problem.
(Not that you are going to price shop for every service--a trip to the emergency room for a broken bone wonte get shopped--but some portion of health Care is discretionary or is deliberate enough it can be shopped.)
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#4[deleted]
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#5I have a high deducible plan and think its a good idea that everyone gets one. It means you're much more aware of costs and much more careful. One of the reasons the total US healthcare bill is so high is that many/most people get lots of unnecessary tests, lots of marginally useful procedures and lots of expensive emergency work instead of trying to be healthy in the first place.
Finally having people feel the sting of the bills will hopefully pressure people to change the system that is both very inefficient and overpays doctors, drug companies and hospitals.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#6I have $6,500 deductable. It's insane how much work I need to do to get healthcare.
The biggest issue is price transparency. To get a price, I need the tax-id of the medical office and the procedure code. Often times the procedure code is unknown because I might have any number of different procedures, depending on what the diagnosis is.
So, I take my list of codes to the health insurance company with the tax ID and wait while they look everything up. This whole thing can take 2 hours.
That's if everyone knows what they're doing. Medical offices are so used to patients not asking about price, their back-office has no idea what to do when someone actually asks how much a procedure will cost.
Then there's the insanity of cash price being cheaper than the insurance price. So, I need to decide if I want to pay $600 and have it go towards my deductible or $450 and pay cash.
I agreed to pay $450 cash and no one in the office understood how to handle it. I finally get to pay the $450 cash and I still got a bill from my insurance for $600 because they also billed my insurance.
You get that? I paid cash and my insurance company still got billed.
Then we have billing errors. I got billed for things I never asked for and/or never received. More wasted time addressing that. Of course, back office is not used to patients reviewing their bill, so there's more confusion to deal with.
I also have an HSA tax free bank account that lets me pay for this stupidity tax free, yay! Dozens of more hours were thrown away trying to understand how HSA accounts work, what I can charge to the HSA account and picking a bank to handle the HSA account.
I spent nearly 100 hours in the last few years dealing with health insurance bullshit.
Imagine how many more wasted hours other Americans deal with.
Fuck this shit already.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#7Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.
I work in Big Healthcare. It's unbelievable what this company wastes money on. It is my daily ethical dilemma. I came to the job to help make healthcare better and quickly found out that this is just a big, publicly traded company whose executives play up the "helping people" aspect but at the end of the day it's all about the money. It's funny because I have avoided the General Dynamics and Lockheed Martins out of concern for the ethics of that kind of work. But every place I have been has been ethically challenged one way or another. You would not believe how many companies are taking government money, for example. America is not the place you imagine it to be, it is truly fascism.
My health insurance costs have well more than doubled since 2014 thanks to ACA. I deliver that failure directly at the doorstep of Obama and his Administration as well as the gutless Supreme Court that could have struck down this awful handout to corporate America.
It's disgusting, completely disgusting.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#8Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.
Just give consumers access to a price list before service is provided. That will go a long way towards helping the problem. (Not that you are going to price shop for every service--a trip to the emergency room for a broken bone wonte get shopped--but some portion of health Care is discretionary or is deliberate enough it can be shopped.)
I agree. This probably won’t be a full solution but at least it would bring a little transparency into the process. Usually going to a US doctor or hospital means to pretty much hand out a blank check telling them to take as much as they feel like and your only hope is that they won’t rip you off too much.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#9Anger is insufficient. Without consumer choice, there is no mechanism for individuals to impose pressure on Healthcare providers and insurers. They can continue to 'milk the cow'.
Just give consumers access to a price list before service is provided. That will go a long way towards helping the problem. (Not that you are going to price shop for every service--a trip to the emergency room for a broken bone wonte get shopped--but some portion of health Care is discretionary or is deliberate enough it can be shopped.)
Price lists and comparisons are available for health insurance plans. That hasn't stopped premiums and deductibles from rising to the point of popular furor.
Re: Rising health insurance deductibles fuel middle-class anger and resentment
#10I have a high deducible plan and think its a good idea that everyone gets one. It means you're much more aware of costs and much more careful. One of the reasons the total US healthcare bill is so high is that many/most people get lots of unnecessary tests, lots of marginally useful procedures and lots of expensive emergency work instead of trying to be healthy in the first place. Finally having people feel the sting…
With employer based insurance and lack of price transparency there is almost nothing the patient can do to reduce costs. You can’t get any upfront pricing, it’s hard to evaluate whether a test is needed, you can’t change insurance.
You are giving the patient responsibility for something they have almost no chance to understand.