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Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

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241–250 of 381 posts

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#241
post #97

not 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...

I will just chip in to point out the obvious: the US healthcare is the teetering house of cards etc etc etc. Many other countries managed this just fine, so the question is, why not also in the US? Follow the money: who gains out of this chaos?

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#242
post #73

Still better than dealing with rationing. The rest of the world better hope the US never goes socialist with health care - kiss innovation goodbye.

I'm no socialist, but you can actually have a system of government health insurance but keep private healthcare. Or basic free healthcare (government run hospitals/clinics) and if you want better, pay out of pocket for private. For example, in my wife's home country, she give birth in an awesome private maternity hospital for about $2k out of pocket for everything. I mean everything. But if we wanted, she could have…

> you can actually have a system of government health insurance but keep private healthcare.

This is what we currently have in the US. In fact, the US government is the largest healthcare insurer in the US (through Medicare and Medicaid) [1].

Interestingly, economists have found the US government becoming a healthcare insurer substantially increased US healthcare prices. For example: "Finkelstein estimates that the introduction of Medicare was associated with a 23 percent increase in total hospital expenditures (for all ages) between 1965 and 1970" [2].

It turns out making healthcare "free" to certain people caused them to demand more healthcare. Higher demand caused higher prices. Congress "didn't consider the effect of the increased demand that Medicare set off." [3] Now healthcare prices are high AND Medicare/Medicaid is being paid through deficit spending.

If we want to solve the problem of unreasonably high prices for healthcare, and the debt that causes, we can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. We need to fix what we've broken with the healthcare market so it can operate like markets do and find a fair price.

[1] https://www.trillianthealth.com/insights/the-compass/the-gov... [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/apr06/medicare-and-its-impact [3] https://reason.com/1993/01/01/the-medicare-monster/

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what they are asking is how someone making an average of 115k, who is also in healthcare doesn’t have better health coverage and still decides to have a kid.

That's not at all a normal cost of having a kid. It says she ended up with twins and they were born prematurely. That said, I have no idea why it wasn't covered or how she ended up getting stuck with the bill. I've had catastrophic occurrences like this, too, years worth of spine surgeries in which I racked up a few million dollars of expenses, but my out of pocket max was $4,000 and that was all I ever had to pay in…

>> Any charges denied by the insurance were just dropped by the provider, not pushed to me.

That's a provider choice, and not guaranteed.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#244
post #72
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans abandoned people who are in favor of abortion. Republicans abandoned liberal Republicans like Bill Weld. Every party abandons people. Democrats consistently hold majority views on a wide range of policy issues and consistently have more votes in national elections. Gerrymandering so that urban centers lose their voting power and other election rigging techniques is what is holding back Democratic policies…

> Republicans abandoned people who are in favor of abortion. Republicans abandoned liberal Republicans like Bill Weld. Every party abandons people. Sure. My point is that the party made this choice deliberately. Trying to pin the blame on Joe Manchin, who is doing yeoman’s work holding onto a key part of the old FDR coalition, is disingenuous. > Democrats consistently hold majority views on a wide range of policy iss…

You are absolutely wrong in thinking Gerrymandering does not affect Congressional popular vote. It absolutely does. Especially in non-Presidential years. There are secondary effects you are ignoring with this incorrect belief. In recent years, since SCOTUS abandoned voting rights, the closure of polling stations also affects voting numbers.

We do not have proportional representation in the House, and the person with the most votes for President lost in 2000 and in 2016. The way Congressional districts are made and the weirdness of the Senate representation is such that we will soon be governed by a minoritist party. Who cares how things were in the 60s and 70s when the topic at hand is about the present day?

EDIT: The Republican Party has overtly attempted to subvert the political norms of the country and continues to do so. Arguing about this or that policy is meaningless unless the messed up way the Senate and House seats are allocated is fixed. That won’t be addressed anytime soon so the situation is essentially hopeless. Oh, and Manchin sabotaged voting rights legislation.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#245
post #203

America has socialized healthcare with a hundred extra steps and implemented in the most inefficient way possible so that everyone comes out worse. Hospitals aren't allowed to deny care (obviously). They will bill people outrageous amounts and know that they will only ever see a fraction of it. So prices for people who do pay are raised considerably to make up for it. People don't get early preventive care due to cos…

> Hospitals aren't allowed to deny care (obviously). They will bill people outrageous amounts and know that they will only ever see a fraction of it. So prices for people who do pay are raised considerably to make up for it.

They absolutely can. They just can't refuse care if you're actively dying or your condition's quickly deteriorating (they have to "stabilize" you). This makes the ER loophole, such as it is, useless as a backdoor for obtaining most hospital care. Plus if you go in for something that's not actually an emergency, they'll just make you wait until you leave. They'll never treat you.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#246

None of these metrics will change the political stance our one majority party took. They have shut their eyes and ears and are hell bent on preserving the interests of the lobbying companies and fetishizing “free market competition”. I can bet a sizeable amount of money that nothing will change in the next 50yrs even. Today there is still a rule that a hospital cannot say no to a patient, I strongly believe that is o…

I make this comment in a lot of threads, but if democrats wanted to fix this problem, they would write legislation for it and try to get it passed. Instead, all we get (from both parties) are massive 1000+ page bills that include a bunch of completely unrelated stuff. Why haven't democrats produce a 10 page bill with a tl;dr of "medical debt is hereby abolished"? Stop pretending the clowns pretending to be politician…

1000+ page bills that include a lot of stuff is an outcome of the political negotiation needed to get enough votes. A 10 page bill is exactly the kind of law that will face stiff opposition because you have to make major concessions to get votes from both Republicans and the more conservative Democrats who are ideologically closer to Republicans on this issue.

US Democrats did write legislation for the issue and did try to get it passed. They even chose an approach originally developed by conservative representatives to try to appeal to conservatives traditionally opposed to government funded/managed healthcare. It's now known as Obamacare and it passed with the slimmest majority then Congress subsequently tried to repeal, deauthorize, defund, or otherwise destroy it like a 100 times [1].

You could just as easily say that if the majority of citizens actually wanted to fix this problem, they would vote out anyone who voted against a conclusive bill. But doesn't happen because voters actually approve of these politicians anyway. You can spend all your money on publicizing "who voted against this healthcare bill" and accomplish exactly nothing, anyone who cares can easily find out anyway.

But sure, it's always rich people's fault.

[1] https://howmanytimeshasthehousevotedtorepealobamacare.com/

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#247
post #203

America has socialized healthcare with a hundred extra steps and implemented in the most inefficient way possible so that everyone comes out worse. Hospitals aren't allowed to deny care (obviously). They will bill people outrageous amounts and know that they will only ever see a fraction of it. So prices for people who do pay are raised considerably to make up for it. People don't get early preventive care due to cos…

I never understood why if they have a cap to at least increase it as population increases. Also we need to give more medical decisions over to advance level (but not doctors) levels of people like Physicians Assistants and Nurse Practitioners.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#248

I hate the way the health-care system works and how it's affected me and those close to me. I spent much of my adult life paying off medical debt exactly like they describe. Defrayed by parents somewhat, but still a significant burden for many years. On one hand, we have debt and bankruptcy as a tool to help individuals deal with costs that would be impossible to save up for. On the other hand, this quote from the ar…

All the ACA did was help some poorer people with insurance, prevent denying accessibility to insurance, and help with "kids" up to 26 with insurance.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#249

Just 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.

Before Michael Crichton wrote fiction, he was a doctor and his first book, "Five Patients", was actually an examination of different topics in healthcare in the 1960's. One topic was the massive cost increases even back then. It's a pretty interesting read too.

Re: Sick and struggling to pay, 100M people in the U.S. live with medical debt

#250

If you have insurance with an out of pocket max, how is it possible to end up paying for more than that?

Sometimes services are rendered which insurance does not deem required, and then refuses to pay for, and some items are simply not covered at all. For example, insulin may be covered by insurance, but needles and syringes are not. On top of that, it's basically impossible to anticipate the cost ahead of time for many procedures. One person I know was quoted $2,000 to $30,000 for a portion of a surgery that is not cov…

That's terrifying. The healthcare issue with the US is what seriously makes me want to live in Europe, at least to try it. The thought of your whole life falling apart just because you need medical care is horrible. I'm living the double-software-engineer-income, no kids life with my partner, and even then I think a major medical issue would be life changing. As a risk-averse person, the US feels like a place to get high rewards as a SWE, but there are massively high risks that don't get talked about often enough.
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