In related news, 100% of newly dead people lose their life savings.
42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
181–190 of 314 posts
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is silly. Please don't make easily-refuted, throwaway political statements like this. On almost any corruption index, the United States ranks far, far better than China. Here's one example: https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept... People do try to measure this stuff.
That link measures peoples perception. My perception is that the influence of money is blatantly epidemic in US politics. But it uses an euphemism; lobbying. Luckily it's not corruption if it's legal.
Lobbing is not inherently corrupt. When a small group cares a lot about a specific issue say astronomers and light pollution lobbing is simply trying to get politions to pay attention to an issue. That effort is not free, in some cases they approach the issue by mailing or dolling people directly, in others they pay somone else to make these calls and phrase things in political terms etc.
Now, that does open the door for people to game the system, but you can’t simply define all lobbing as corruption or even all lobbing you disagree with as corruption.
So, yes their are plenty of blatant cases of corruption but they are relatively rare compared to China.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These are enormously beneficial to insurance companies (they essentially have unlimited liability without them) and there is a ton of money to have the caps reinstated. I don't understand why you'd phrase it this way. Under the ACA, 80% of premiums have to go to medical care. A dollar saved providing care disproportionately benefits the premium payers, not the company. People act like all this money comes out of in…
The entire point of insurance is to pool risk so that a bunch of people together pay reasonable amounts, instead of a few people paying enormous amounts and the others paying less. Lifetime limits give you lower rates in exchange for making the insurance much less like actual insurance. If we’re talking about “don’t piss on my leg and tell me its raining,” don’t sell me “health insurance” that will leave me high and…
The entire point of insurance is...
Oh good, we're going to hash this out from the very beginning.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#184In other news, the water is wet.
I've only been living for a couple of years on the US now but one thing that is among the hardest to get used to is the costs of medical care.
Often times going to the doctor once shields 3, 4 different invoices. I once made the rookie mistake of going to an E.R. for something I could have waited for, I think I had one of those head splitting head aches. They charged me something like $800 or so for ~10 minutes with the doctor. Another time, I had to pay something crazy like $300 for an X-Ray. Gotta pay for the cost of research of development for that cutting edge technology, X-Rays, huh? :-p
I can only imagine what it would be like if I had a very severe condition like cancer.
This is specially shocking for me coming from a country where health care is of high quality and publicly accessible (Argentina). Private care is also available and reasonably priced, the reasons to go that route is shorter wait times for appointments, nicer facilities, etc.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the thing. Cancer comes in basically two types. That which is treatable, and that which isn't. This can be either because of the type of cancer, or based on how early/late it was detected. A lot of (possibly most of?) the money spent treating cancer is spent in cases that have very little chance for long term success. I don't think it really is, but it almost seems like a deliberate attempt to extract all the…
It'd be helpful to track down where the wealth goes. It seems to be broken down between the care provider, hospital, pharmaceutical companies and possibly the insurance company. Has anyone fully tracked down averages on where the money tends to go (possibly different for different types of cancer?)
Depends on the treatment. The cost to a hospital of a typical chemo visit is roughly 50% drugs and 50% labor. An endoscopic surgical procedure for lung cancer is roughly 70% labor and 30% supplies. The average total costs for both are in the tens of thousands of dollars. That doesn't include fixed costs, just variable costs.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#186Sad, but not surprising. The majority of bankruptcies are caused from medical bills.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone living in the Netherlands this sounds truly savage and heart breaking. I really, really wouldn't want to live in the US.
To play devil's advocate, looking at 5-year survival rates by country, you'd be 15-20% more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands. YMMV.
Did you factor wealth into that? I would hazard a guess that the bottom 20%-40% in the U.S. would have a considerably lower survival rate than the average for the rest of the country.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#188I recently watched a family member go through this. A few things that were sobering to see: - Three weeks in she was buried in paperwork. One chemo treatment would turn into 4-5 invoices from different subcontractors at a single hospital, some covered by her insurance, others not covered. Her insurer denied claims arbitrarily and made her go through a bunch of invasive and unnecessary procedures to prove her illness.…
I'm curious to find out what it would take for someone to create a service that counters some of these dark patterns. The abundance of companies using dark patterns in their subscriptions to prevent subscription cancellations has led to other companies offering services that allow you to manage your various subscriptions with ease and cancel subscriptions with even greater ease. I'm wondering what it would take to ap…
Making insurance carriers legally required to act as a fiduciary to the person holding insurance benefits would be a good start.
States requiring medical services to bundle billing through a state agency (one place to pay) would be another. Although this would in practice mean a bigger government, I think a majority of people would agree to it. Likewise apportionment of payments would go to approved and priority based on service date.
Of course the next step would be to limit exposure to credit to a "single" entry for all medical related bills, and limit the total payroll deductions allowed for medical bills to a total of 10% of one's gross income (deduction pre-tax).
This would take a lot of work inside individual states and at the federal level.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#189You should be more specific here. IN AMERICA. Developed countries dont have this issue.
Although I personally find the last sentence unnecessary, I agree with the first part. I've noticed on multiple occasions the last few weeks on both HN and Reddit that headlines + reactions all somehow assume that when no geographic details are given, US is assumed.
Re: 42 percent of new cancer patients lose their life savings
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone living in the Netherlands this sounds truly savage and heart breaking. I really, really wouldn't want to live in the US.
To play devil's advocate, looking at 5-year survival rates by country, you'd be 15-20% more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands. YMMV.
> more likely to survive in the US after you contract cancer than in the Netherlands.
Not after you contract cancer. After it's been detected.
This is a common misunderstanding of the statistics.
If the Netherlands implemented a huge national screening programme and screened every man over 55 for prostate cancer, and then did nothing at all with those men (zero treatment) their 5 year cancer survival rates would go up. This is because some cancers are slow growing. Lots of men will die with prostate cancer, but not of prostate cancer.
But when we've given someone a scan and found prostate cancer it's hard to say "well, you have cancer, but we're not going to do anything", so you then start treatment. This carries risk of side effects and accidental harm which lower quality of life but might not provide any benefit.
5 year survival rates are just one measure, and you might want to look at life expectancy or quality of life measures instead.
If all that testing and treatment isn't increasing length of life, and is making quality of life worse, and is bankrupting people it's probably a good idea to look at a different way of doing things.