join my battle cry: just stay alive until 2014
portability is a key provision will take away the chains employers use to bind, threaten, and subjugate employees; using their families health.
Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
101–110 of 215 posts
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't a minor condition. It was a staph infection. Don't let the term bugbite mislead you. His son wasn't in the hospital for a bugbite. He was in the hospital for a life threatening infection from an antibiotic resistant infection. That is far from minor. Disclaimer: I'm not arguing for PPACA in any way but if you are going to base you argument on billing for a "minor" condition then make sure it's actually a mi…
So... MRSA Staph Infection... what is the cost to correctly diagnose? And what is the cost of the antibiotics? I'm not a doctor, but most non-boutique antibiotics are dirt cheap. I didn't intend to trivialize the illness. I more meant that this could happen to _anyone_. And if this is the cost for things that can happen to anyone, we have a real problem on our hands. Much like it's a problem that a basic, no-complica…
From the article, at least a two day hospital stay, IV, antibiotics, the time of the nurses checking in on him, the doctor(s) rounding on him, and the orderlies and cleaning staff keeping the place clean. Staying in the hospital is not cheap.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#103As a Canadian, I couldn't imagine having to decide between money and healthcare. I don't know how you guys do it... Relevant reading: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/07/12/how-i-lost-...
I lived in Canada for 10 years. I left precisely because of the awful healthcare being denied my son, despite laws stating to the contrary. My son suffers because so-called medical professionals sat on his case (Autism) for more than a year, with excuse after excuse, problem after problem. Some of the people blamed budget issues, others lied, others through sheer incompetence. I'm not exaggerating. There is nothing t…
Canada is a single-payer health care system. A common problem with single-payer health care systems is access to specialty care. It is indeed tragic to care for someone you know is sick while being stuck in multi-week delays waiting for a doctor who can actually help.
It's also true that this is not one of America's big problems. Now, our specialists will bankrupt you, that's true, but you will actually get to see them pretty quickly.
Like Switzerland's system, the PPACA guaranteed-issue/mandatory-coverage system is potentially a best-of-both-worlds solution. The market for health insurance stays private, modulo federal (contentious, bureaucratic definitions of "minimum care" to qualify plans), but consumer costs are predictable.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not hard to get insurance for a 10 person company, but it is expensive.
Interesting. I mostly know people trying to buy individual health insurance, whose difficulty really varies, depending on age and health history. Is even a 10-person company big enough that buying it isn't a problem, if you're willing to pay the "10-person company" premium? In particular, do they inquire into the distribution of health among those 10 people? I would've guessed that if 1 of your 10 employees happened…
You can get group coverage (by which I mean, "insurance plans in which individual members of the team will not need to fill out applications") for teams smaller than 10 people, but probably not much smaller.
In the US, group health coverage is distinguished in part by not "qualifying" patients, so that latter example doesn't really come up. There are horror stories about companies being forced out of their insurance plans by prohibitive cost spikes after major medical events, but I don't have any of them ready to deploy on this thread.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having experienced emergency care in both Denmark and the U.S., this is also the main reason I won't relocate to the U.S. until this is sorted out. I had what was thought to be a broken ankle in Denmark thanks to icy conditions and I was so well looked after, and charged nothing, I was awe inspired and wish there had been some way to pay it back. I sliced a finger in the U.S. and was made to feel like a statistic, wi…
It's not fair, and not right, but it is a fact that for the most part, most of us here don't have to worry about that. If you're a software engineer or systems administrator or similar type of professional earning a fair living it's not at all uncommon to have completely free health insurance for yourself, and affordable options to cover your family. I haven't worked for a place with an individual premium in 5 years.…
As others have said, it's a problem for anyone who wants to do work outside of the "middle class employment cocoon".
I'm self employed, and even if I go back to working for a larger company, I would prefer to continue to keep my private insurance. I have private homeowner's insurance. I have private car insurance. I have private life insurance. Why oh why do we demand/insist that employers provide health care, to the detriment of market forces favoring individual purchasing?
Conservatives in this country should be in an uproar that the 'free market' isn't allowed to run its course because of the combined interference of big business, big labor and big govt over the past several decades, but they're not.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#106Silly americans... in my country, it's obligatory to have health insurance and if you cannot afford it, the government will pay your insurance, for god's sake. Not even the most conservative and right-wing politicans who see our freedom in danger when we can't keep fully automatic assault rifles at home anymorehere question this system, because it just makes sense.
Can someone please explain to me the purpose of an insurance company when participation in the pool is mandatory? A policy like this seems like it creates a legislated middle-man that just wastes money.
Participation in the automobile risk pool is mandatory in all 50 states, even in states with no-fault accident laws. Nobody questions whether auto insurance companies are really insurers. Similarly, while huge companies aren't required to insure their commercial activities, virtually all of them do.
Mandatory coverage is orthogonal to the question of whether health insurance is a proper insurance scheme, or some kind of social safety net entitlement, or a utility. The sole purpose of the mandate is to make free-riding on the insurance market unlawful; it's a mitigation for an asymmetric information problem.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#107It costs $121/month for 100% coinsurance, no copay, and a 3000 yearly maximum cost in network. Can no one spend <10% of their income on their health?
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
8% sounds great. US currently spends around 16% of GDP on health care every year. I think the majority of Americans would support a universal health care system that provides far more coverage at half the cost. Instead our total spend is expected to double by 2020. Source: http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/28/news/economy/healthcare_spen...
The great thing is that this expense grows at a rate of 9%/year while the economy is stagnant. If GDP miraculously and immediately begins to grow at 5%/year, health care spending will completely eclipse it in 50 years. If it does not, health care spending will completely eclipse it in 28 years.
Herbert Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
The only question is how the rate of growth will slow/stop.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can someone please explain to me the purpose of an insurance company when participation in the pool is mandatory? A policy like this seems like it creates a legislated middle-man that just wastes money.
Participation in the automobile risk pool is mandatory in all 50 states, even in states with no-fault accident laws. Nobody questions whether auto insurance companies are really insurers. Similarly, while huge companies aren't required to insure their commercial activities, virtually all of them do. Mandatory coverage is orthogonal to the question of whether health insurance is a proper insurance scheme, or some kind…
Participation in the automobile risk pool is mandatory in all 50 states
Only if you own a car and drive it on public roads.
Re: Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite
#110This is putting things exactly backwards. The argument is roughly "Treating a minor condition cost $24k, which could wipe people out financially, therefore PPACA is important." Where is the outrage over this price? What part of PPACA does ANYTHING to reduce this cost? PPACA does essentially 2 things: 1) It makes insurance "affordable" for people who previously couldn't obtain it at all. 2) Drastically increases deman…
We also need to increase the pool of doctors.
We probably don't so much need to deal with malpractice insurance, since that fix doesn't (to employ a congenial metaphor) change the exponent in the Big-O cost of health care.
We need to make it simpler to get drugs on the market, but we also need to walk the tightrope of doing that while regulating pharma marketing, particularly to medical practices.
We need to restructure care in the US. We recognize that the E.R. is a terrible provider-of-first-resort and that non-emergency E.R. visits are damaging the system. We need to start realizing that M.D. doctors are also poor providers of first resort, and get a nationwide system of low-cost clinics deployed. That's already starting to happen at places like Walgreens.
We very much need to figure out how to start exploiting the Internet to provide some level of routine care for patients.
These are all things that do need to happen. But they don't have much to do with the problem that insurance problems are randomly bankrupting large numbers of Americans. We need to fix that problem first. Face it: the most expensive cohort of patients in the US, accounting for by far the majority of our exposure to rising medical costs, have had socialized single-payer health care for decades. Access to private insurance and the "cost curve" of health care are simply orthogonal problems.