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What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

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Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#391

Post by tdsamardzhiev »

bko wrote: post #377
cogman10 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't let The Perfect be the enemy of The Good." We are overspending on the quality of health care we get today. Further there is a lot of fear mongering about socialized medicine. I've experienced medicine in both the UK and the US. I can tell you, there isn't a difference in quality. Further, when I got a cold and went in, wait time wasn't 6 hours or whatever other BS people claim. Wait time was ~10 minutes. In fa…

Why did you go to a doctor for a cold? That seems to be a problem. You send someone to school for 10 years and they spend their time talking to patients about a runny nose due to a common cold. And for what? To write a prescription?

To get an absence note for school/work? To make sure it's a common cold?

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#392

Post by james_s_tayler »

newyankee wrote: post #388
veb wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sadly been to hospital via ambulance quite a lot for seizure activity and that kinda carrying on. The biggest bill was when I received my $54 bill for the ambulance! Oh no. (St John is a volunteer ambulance service). So, I went and paid it and then paid them $80 for an annual househould membership - meaning if anyone in my house ever needs an ambulance, it's free! I'm aware however, with the rescue helicopters t…

Wow, the more i read, the more difficult it is for me to believe. At this point i feel that the US healthcare industry is the biggest rent extraction industry in the world and they try to get away with it to the extent they can with every stakeholder blaming someone else. I have lived here for 9 years and although have paid my insurance diligently i always get anxiety at going to the doctor's office.

It is.

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#393

Post by fencepost »

ThomPete wrote: post #363
fencepost wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get downvoted by sounding like a knee jerk racist. Go spend a little time looking into where healthcare money is actually being spent and written off as bad debt in the US then come back with numbers and sources. If you can back up that illegal immigrants are the source of healthcare cost issues in pretty sure we'll all be impressed.

Huh? That's not what I said at all. I was explaining how the US system is very different than the Scandinavian system. That's all. You can't compare them at all. Whatever racist undertone you heard there was your doing not mine.

Any time you're in an online discussion of US healthcare expenses and use the phrase "11 million illegal immigrants" you've pretty much just placed yourself into a category as far as almost anyone else reading the discussion is concerned.

That may not be what you meant to do and that categorization may not be fair, but it's one of many possible trigger phrases.

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#394

Post by cityzen »

There is a documentary on HBO now called Bleed Out. If you want to know how absolutely fucked the US medical system is, watch it. You will probably never want you or anyone you love to ever step foot in a hospital again.

These insurance companies and hospital groups are pure evil. Absolutely disgusted with what a backwards ass country America is.

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#395

Post by toomuchtodo »

jopsen wrote: post #353
ttcbj wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, this is exactly how I feel. They did it to themselves. I really believe in free markets, and I really see the downsides of gov't intervention, but my direct experience with this particular market says we'd be better off with the gov't.

You can still have aspects of a free market.. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Medicare-for-All is just public insurance. It's not a state take over of all private hospitals. But instead of negotiating a price with you, the hospital will be negotiating with the state. Hospitals can still compete on prices and likely the state will grant contracts for non-urgent services to the cheapest provider.. Modulo, whatever level o…

It’s effectively a state takeover, as providers can negotiate with the Health and Human Services department in the same way that my child can negotiate their allowance with me.

Disclaimer: In full support of single payer/government managed healthcare

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#396

Post by xenadu02 »

thinkloop wrote: post #368
xenadu02 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone. Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow. That is both a massive distortion and non-optimal for the economy as a whole. The…

> There are certainly regulatory inefficiencies and other inefficiencies in healthcare markets, but a truly "free market" in healthcare not morally justifiable Socialized healthcare has its own "immoral" trade-offs. We essentially reduce per capita quality in favor of all-inclusive coverage. Proponents of free-market healthcare would argue that the inefficient allocation of resources inherent to socialization is immo…

> Socialized healthcare has its own "immoral" trade-offs. We essentially reduce per capita quality in favor of all-inclusive coverage

That's a false dichotomy; there are many mixed systems where the government provides a baseline level of care with private insurance providing additional services or benefits (eg: government covers a shared hospital room, private insurance covers a private room).

>Libertarians would argue that forcing money from one person to give to another for medical care is immoral

True libertarians also argue that all taxation is theft (if they're purists anyway), making road construction immoral.

> Framing it around morality makes the other side seem abhorrent and the situation difficult to find common ground.

A "free market" in healthcare requires us to condemn people to death or debilitating injury when they cannot afford care. Unlike nearly every other area, this one literally involves life and death so I believe it must meet a different standard than other activity (economic or otherwise).

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#397

Post by mikekchar »

prewett wrote: post #386
fencepost wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1000/month is probably a heck of a plan or in a really expensive market if it's for a single person, and it's probably still decent for family coverage. If it was through the ACA Exchange it's probably also a Gold plan that when you look at maximum out of pocket costs simply loads up the premium rather than the OOP payments.

In California the cheapest plan is about $450/month from the Obamacare marketplace, so I'm not sure $1000/month is going to be that outstanding. And as I understand it, $450/month is about the minimum a plan can cost, since Obamacare outlawed the old high-deductible catastrophic insurance. Also, I doubt that the average family has $12,0000 of medical bills a year, and would be better off paying out of pocket except f…

Obvious typo aside ($12K not $120K), this is entirely the point of insurance. If the average person would save money by buying insurance, then the insurance company would be losing money. In general, if you can afford to pay for the worst case scenario, you are always better off without insurance (BTW, this includes "extended warrantee plans" hint, hint). Insurance is for things where your can't afford the worst case scenario.

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#398

Post by dleslie »

jopsen wrote: post #343
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is because the culture is quite different in DK compared to the US. There is an expectation of how it will work which is very different by everyone involved.

No, it's because ambulance service in Denmark is a public contract. Private citizen don't pay out of pocket. Essentially, the state (or region) contracts a company to deliver ambulance services. The contracts usually last a few years and are limited to a region. Furthermore, the company that wins the contract (usually lowest bidder) is held accountable is too many responses are too slow, etc.. usually with hefty fine…

British Columbia, Canada, does this as well. Ambulatory services are provided by contractors. So are most paramedical services.

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#399

Post by lenkite »

merpnderp wrote: post #53
edoo wrote: post #10

Health care is the only industry where the felony laws regarding up front pricing aren't enforced. It was allowed to become a twisted regulatory nightmare where the laws were written by the industry itself utilizing kneejerk methods to obtain profit at the cost of systemic corruption.

And yet it is by far the most regulated industry in the US. Almost as if the more invasive the regulations the more invasive the corruption.

Laws made and lobbied to _ensure_ that the health tycoons can't be challenged and remain on top of the hill, crapping on all below.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/31/17629526/m...

Re: What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills

#400

Post by lojack »

wmil wrote: post #109
andrei_says_ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What blows my mind is how a nurse costs $5k for the duration of a surgery. Surely the nurse did not make $5k. Where does this money go?

Hospitals are required to treat the uninsured, but the government doesn't actually compensate them for that. So they jack up everyone else's bills in the hopes that enough people will pay that they'll make a profit. Insurance companies will usually push back, so (sometimes partially) uninsured people with decent credit hit with huge charges.

> Hospitals are required to treat the uninsured

This is actually only a half truth. Emergency rooms are required to treat patients who need emergency care. They don't need to fix all ailments. If you have cancer they can turn you away, but if your organs are failing as the result of cancer they have to treat you. If you need a heart surgery they can turn you away, but if you're having a heart attack they need to treat you. For the most part, treatment is pretty much just making sure you're stable and can leave the hospital without immediately dying. This only applies to emergency rooms as well. Where you go to get surgeries is usually not the same place you go to treat an emergency condition. It might be affiliated with the same hospital, and might be attached to the emergency room, but it isn't itself an emergency room.

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