A Crowdfunding Site To Help Pay Patients' Medical Bills 285
Lucas123 writes: A start-up financial services company called Someone With Group has just completed a pilot of a crowdfunding service that allows hospitals to set up campaigns to help patients pay their medical expenses. The website, which is HIPAA compliant in terms of privacy and security, allows patients facing medical debts to inform family, friends and even strangers of their need for funds versus flowers or cards. The crowdfunding service also addresses a systemic debt issue in the healthcare industry. Each year, the U.S. healthcare industry writes off $40 billion in bad debt from unpaid medical bills. "Then you consider that $6 billion is spent on cards and flowers for patients every year. Why can't we redirect that money and put it into a debit instrument restricted to medical spending only?" said Jagemann-Bane, CEO of Someone With Group. One hospital group, Pinnacle Health Systems in Harrisburg, Penn., routinely writes off $40 million to $50 million a year in unpaid medical bills from patients. The hospital set up a crowdfunding site via Someone With Group and so far has seen a couple dozen patients use it. ... After a one-year pilot of the crowdfunding service, patients who've used it on average have raised $2,315.
The Bake Sale Model (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Bake Sale Model (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a better, better idea.
1. Use real costs. The fact that there is an "insurance cost" and a "self pay costs" tells us all we need to know about medical bills. They aren't tied to the actual cost of service in any meaningful way.
2. Make it transparent. How can anyone plan for non-emergency care when the prices are hidden behind a wall of Insurance red tape? I had an elective procedure done. I was quoted one price before and then presented with a bill for 5 times that later.
Re:The Bake Sale Model (Score:4, Informative)
1. Use real costs. The fact that there is an "insurance cost" and a "self pay costs" tells us all we need to know about medical bills. They aren't tied to the actual cost of service in any meaningful way.
The problem with that is that a lot of people who end up in bankruptcy over medical costs have insurance. Their rates are already discounted for their insurance, but they can't afford their deductibles, copays, or uncovered expenses. Even if everyone paid the same price, that problem wouldn't go away.
On top of that, as the primary mission of every insurance company in the country is to make money - not to provide coverage for the patient (as that costs money) - the insurance companies are constantly searching for clever new ways to deny claims. Being as the federal government essentially gave the insurance industry a license to print money back in 2010 with the affordable care act, they now have free reign to try whatever they want to "bring costs down".
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I have a better, better idea.
1. Use real costs. The fact that there is an "insurance cost" and a "self pay costs" tells us all we need to know about medical bills. They aren't tied to the actual cost of service in any meaningful way.
2. Make it transparent. How can anyone plan for non-emergency care when the prices are hidden behind a wall of Insurance red tape? I had an elective procedure done. I was quoted one price before and then presented with a bill for 5 times that later.
This is *exactly* the issue. That $40B that is "written off" is actually paid by the suckers who pay without insurance. Hospitals literally only collect something like 10% of what is "owed" to them, so they simply charge 10x as much.
I often buy medical services without insurance because it's cheaper if you're a good negotiator. Reread that. I use a simple tactic that goes like this: "I need ______ done and I will pay cash up front at the medicare reimbursement rate." The response is then "we don't mak
Re: The Bake Sale Model (Score:2)
I'm not sure whether this is true or not, but running an MRI is Expensive. The rate you quote (Medicare cost) wouldn't cover the real expense of running an MRI office. And that is the problem: Medicare doesn't cover the real cost and the cost is thus shifted to private insurances.
The US government NEVER covers the real cost of anything: research has to be subsidized by student tuition, medical has to be subsidized by private insurance, public utilities are subsidized by private companies levying bills.
And y
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Even the non-insurance costs are so high as to be unaffordable for most people. Health insurance isn't like car insurance, where most people won't ever cause much damage and so prices are low. Most people will have some kind of expensive illness in their life. About 40% of people in developed nations will have some kind of cancer alone.
Obviously society also has a stake in general healthcare, as we have seen recently in areas where vaccination rates are low.
It's also in societies interests to ensure that pe
Re:The Bake Sale Model (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW I agree, but was using it to get to a point: A free market solution (using real costs) can't work if you can't refuse to do business based on that price.
And that's one of the reasons why health care has no place in the Free Market.
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There are problems with single payer too. It isn't just some magical cure all.
I am not talking about money, the US is wealthy enough to fund this with increased taxes. However the issues is in the details.
Giving all the population health care will increase demand for health care services, and if the health providers are limited to government controlled rates, then there is little motivation for expansion to meet such demand. So there will be long wait lines for health services. Hoping the long wait time wi
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Part of the problem is the way healthcare is billed in this country.
If I go in and see a doctor, I'm billed for an office visit. If I get a flu shot, which I'm supposed to do every year given my underlying medical conditions, it's a separate billable expense. Take a test, that's another bill. Xray? Another bill.
Maybe we should treat the patient as a whole, rather than as a series of billable events?
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Of course separate events are separate billable events. None of those other things are free. They cost someone money. They might not even be something that your local pill pusher can handle himself. Lab work is an obvious example.
Even if they were all handled as a single invoice, accountability and auditing would require that they can all be broken out individually.
EOBs are kind of crap already. They need to be MORE detailed rather than less.
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No. Way. You want to hand over healthcare to the same brain trust whose last pass was essentially "We're going to make health care more affordable by making more people buy it." Anyone who ever took Econ 101 could tell you that wouldn't work, and it hasn't.
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Has it? I must have misunderstood all those stories about rates going up so much this year.
The ACA got a lot of people health insurance that they didn't have to pay for. Net societal good? Sure. I'd like to see everybody covered. The ACA utterly failed to do anything about actual healthcare costs. What we very much don't need is a world where everybody's covered, and we can all go see our doctor (for $300 for a 10 minute visit), but we only pay a $20 copay, then freak out because our taxes are so high
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As an actual patient, I am less concerned about getting a bargain. I want access to the best care possible. I want the latest bleeding edge treatments and overpriced miracle cures. Those things don't happen without economic incentives. Gutting the US medical system will destroy those incentives and harm EVERY PATIENT ON THE PLANET including the socialist ones that brag about stiffing American drug companies.
I don't want to eat dirt. I don't want cheap junk for less. I want the best. If we're paying more tha
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I really don't think you do, but hey, it's your dollar. Do what you want with it.
Personally, I get most of my healthcare from a world-class medical institution, but sometimes I really don't want the best care possible. I had a paronychia (infection around the fingernail that was bugging me). I *could* have gone to my $300 doctor. I could have gone to the ER, which arguably has even better doctors, but with a wait and a $2,000 bill for walking in the door. I went to Minute Clinic. Retail cost: $89. I
Just have medicare for all and get rid of the over (Score:4, Insightful)
Just have medicare for all and get rid of the overpriced priced bills that have A single aspirin for $25
Re:Just have medicare for all and get rid of the o (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I love living in the UK and will defend the NHS until my death.
Here in the UK I don't have to worry about the cost of my healthcare, and if I want it quicker or I want a nicer bed then I always have the option of paying privately anyway.
This is also why Jeremy Hunt can fuck off and keep his slimy mitts to himself.
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I've supported the idea of something like the UK system for years. But people in the USA will need to get over a few things first. The biggest preconception people have is that under single payer, they will get the same treatment, but for free.
Unfortunately, we insist on deluxe treatment (under threat of malpractice lawsuit for not providing the best care possible). That's not going to be easy for people to give up. Free, they can get behind. Not getting the nice bed in a private room, not so much.
I tr
Re: Just have medicare for all and get rid of the (Score:2)
The biggest thing in US vs Europe is tax rate. The effective federal tax rate in the US is 25% for those that can't (really) afford either ObamaCare or private insurance. In the UK it's 45%. If you sink 20% of your income into private insurance, you can pay for very good private insurance in the US.
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This is why I love living in the UK and will defend the NHS until my death.
Here in the UK I don't have to worry about the cost of my healthcare, and if I want it quicker or I want a nicer bed then I always have the option of paying privately anyway.
I'm a fan of the two tier system as well. Assured basic coverage from a national system and the option to pay extra if you want a different service level. The big thing would be to get all the non-emergency patients out of the emergency room and into the system where they belong; since ER care is probably the most expensive in the hospital. Of course, it's not just a simple as offering free care elsewhere but ensuring they can navigate the system and have a way to get to the appointment; otherwise they'll s
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A big issue being seen by GP's today is that there has been a loss of home-knowledge about illnesses in newer generations - an illness which would have put you in bed with chicken soup, a hot water bottle and a good book 30 years ago now necessitates a visit to the GP for antibiotics (even though they don't work against viral illnesses, as any doctor will tell you) or A&E if the GP surgery is closed.
One of the quickest growing group of users of the NHS is in those under 30 - despite the UK population gr
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...then you must not keep up with the news then.
There's restrictions on cancer drugs due to budget restrictions.
Doctors threatening to go on strike over pay cuts and work hours.
Discussions about rationing of simple orthopedic surgeries or limiting them based on some yet to be defined "merit" criteria.
In general, the order of the day seems to be budget cuts and rationing.
Right now, the NHS is actually more of a cautionary tale.
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My mother suffers from Chromic Lymphatic Leukaemia, started treatment within two weeks of being diagnosed in 2005, received all the drugs necessary and went into remission. Ten years on, she still has regular checkups, tests and support from the same doctors.
All for free.
Don't think that the few cases that come up in the news are indicative of all cases.
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In the UK, Accident and Emergency has a 4 hour waiting restriction on patients - if the patient has not been seen and treatment is not underway within 4 hours of them presenting at A&E, it becomes a major incident that needs to be investigated.
We do have an issue at several hospitals currently where there has been an upsurge in breaches in waiting time where A&E departments have reached capacity, but having private hospitals wouldnt help there as its a max capacity issue brought around by a step cha
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Re:Just have medicare for all and get rid of the o (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I would. If you can wait 4 hours to be seen, is it really an emergency?
Go in with a cardiac arrest and you will be seen straight away.
Go in with a broken nose, you wait your turn.
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A&E departments are staffed independently of the rest of the hospital, so there is no such thing as an "on call doc" in A&E - when your turn to be seen by a doctor comes up, you are assigned to a bay in the A&E department and you sit in that bay until you either move on to another department (AMU for admissions, X-ray for x-rays etc etc) or receive your treatment and are discharged. You are not sent back to the waiting room to be called back through.
If hospitals gamed the system as you describe
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*rolls eyes*
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And you only hear of the few extreme cases. The wait times for the ER are long in Canada because too many people go there for things that they should be going to a clinic for and so they wait. And the Ontario government isn't helping things with this. My family doctor is part of a clinic and if I don't go to that clinic or the ER then my doctor gets a penalty. So if I have a bad cold that I'm worried that may be turning into bronchitis and the clinic doesn't have any openings today or isn't running their
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This is SO full of sh*t. Yes, during an outbreak of c. difficile or flu, the hospital is running over capacity. So you end up on a gurney in the hallway in ER. But you still get the treatment you need, and when a room opens up, it's not left empty.
Your grandmother could have asked to be transferred to another hospital. Problem solved.
If more people didn't go directly to an ER for minor things, but went to one of the clinics, that would go a long way to solving the problem of waiting times.
Oh, btw, if you
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I'm Canadian, I occasionally use Medicare and I'm satisfied with it. Yes, outpatient service in hospitals is nearly always slow. But based on personal and other people's experience, real emergencies are generally taken care of quickly.
When/where it's available, avoid outpatient service by using local, smaller health clinics. They're generally fast, and often take appointments so you don't have to wait 4-5 hours at the
Re:Just have medicare for all and get rid of the o (Score:4, Insightful)
But you're in the UK and have never used the US system. How long does it take to get a appointment at the local surgery.
If I phone in the morning and it sounds important usually a couple of hours. If I say something like "can I review my hayfever tablets, I hear that there are some newer and better drugs", then its days, sometimes into next week.
Now add the weeks or months it takes to see the specialist you're referred to. Now add many more months to find a slot to be treated.
The NHS being great is a myth. It takes forever to get seen, scanned and treated.i
Again, it depends. My wife had a clicking and achy knee and waited two weeks to be seen and another 10 to be treated. My brother had a small stroke and, wha given an MRI and a treatment within hours.
And as to your "private" option bullshit. Guess what? When they're over booked for operation type or birth, you get told to fuck off back to the NHS, but you get a small refund on your BUPA premium. Been there, done that, seen it with friends and colleagues.
That concurs with what my dad says, that the best use of a company healthcare plan is to get a nicer room in an NHS hospital.
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Appointment at local surgery? Up to two weeks if its non-urgent, same day if its urgent.
Consultant appointment? Again, depends on urgency - same week for some things, 18 weeks for non-urgent.
For example, my wife had a stroke scare the day before Christmas eve, she experienced dysphasia which passed after 10 - 15 minutes. We rang the GP the next morning, within an hour she was in a clinic in the hospital, MRI, CT, blood tests all underway. Follow up MRI this week.
My mother in law needed a growth removing
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Just have medicare for all and get rid of the overpriced priced bills that have A single aspirin for $25
You hit on one of the numbers behind the $40 billion in unpaid bills. Hospitals jack up bills because they have to cover the costs on un or under insured patients; so you see $25 aspirins. Insurance companies pay no where near those prices; for example when I look at a bill a $500.00 bill becomes about $125 once all the negotiated prices are reflected in the bill. Hospitals have the high rack rates to try cover costs from those who can pay and don't have insurance. Even someone who doesn't have insurance w
Remove all the constrains and regulations (Score:2)
And the aspirin (or equivalent) will cost you $0.25.
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Where do you think the $25 aspirin came from? Medicare publishes how much they are willing to pay for a service code. The clinic then establishes a "cost" of double what Medicare will pay. Then your insurance company steps in and says "$50 for aspirin is insane, we'll only pay $35."
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Insurance companies don't get rich writing checks.
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Insurance companies write plenty of checks.
They are generally evil but they are more than willing to pay claims. Medical providers engage in abusive billing practices that are just bad enough not to be blatantly illegal. There's also a fair amount of genuine fraud as well.
There are a number of things that could stand reform here and Obamacare completely ignored them.
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I know somebody with medicaid. She can see a local doctor, and prescriptions are completely covered. She pays no premium and has no income.
There is something horribly wrong with this picture.
People will debate "wrongness," but in that situation, you are buying her medicaid for her. And depending on where she lives, she may have a real problem finding a doctor willing to take her on as a patient, because he loses money (not just less income, but actual negative cash flow) with every hour spent with each such patient.
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It's not even Medicaid. Medicare also has this problem.
I'm really amused by any American that wants to embrace socialized medicine. Sure, the Germans might be able to pull it off but when has the US ever done well implementing welfare?
Do they not know any poor people or old people or veterans? Clearly not.
Just about any welfare program that existed in the US ever has had to deal with claw backs from the GOP. Even if it started out well it eventually devolved into something awful as soon as something like 20
Still ignoring the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that these people got sick. It's that they have incurred these radical medical bills as a result of contracts between the hospitals and the insurance companies to intentionally drive up the prices. This is the definition of collusion and for the insurance companies it borders on racketeering. Every hospital in the US is just as guilty as every medical insurance broker and until we call them on their shit you're only going to make things worse by enabling them.
But who cares as long as you can go to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, right?
Re:Still ignoring the issue (Score:5, Funny)
But who cares as long as you can go to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, right?
You don't even want to see the cost of the tests they do when you come in with those symptoms.
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I'm confused, I usually see this exact statement posted as an argument against the kind of thing I just posted. But I would suspect that, as a non-AC, you've actually done a cursory google search and found that it's actually an argument in favor of the point I'm trying to make: http://www.whattoexpect.com/pr... [whattoexpect.com]
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This hits close but one of the targets is off the mark. It is colusion between the drug companies and the insurance providers that catches the hospitals in the middle. Every year the price of every drug goes up by 10-15% and the hospital can't do a damned thing except budget for more drug increases. What else can they do? Let their patients die? Because the drug and insurance companies sure as hell will throw a few patients over board to pressure the hospitals.
Interesting Concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in the US... :-( (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in the US would something like this be required.
Please pick one of the healthcare models here in Europe instead - around here we don't consider the value of a person's life to be based on how rich they are.
Re: Only in the US... :-( (Score:2)
around here we don't consider the value of a person's life to be based on how rich they are.
I spent most of a decade working at a big medical center near the northern US border. So many [wealthy] Canadians.
But, yeah, the US prices have gone nuts since the HMO Act of 1973. Here's [tomwoods.com] an Emergency Room doc talking about how bad it is and offering some solutions .
no need for crowdfunding (Score:3, Insightful)
or you could get with the rest of the civilized world and not have health care a for profit venture.
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big numbers not so big. (Score:2)
It appears that the healthcare industry takes in over 3 trillion a year. 40 billion is what 1.3 percent? Maybe I missed a zero or something but it doesn't sound like it is a terribly big problem.
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It isn't evenly distributed, and it isn't the only loss in the system.
The goal and result of the last 50 years of tinkering has been to completely destroy the pricing system in medicine. No one in any part of the system has any idea of what anything costs. That includes patients, doctors, nurses, administrators, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, etc.
Be extremely skeptical of any dollar figures you see related to mainstream medicine. None of them have any connection to reality.
Do
Costs can be lowered (Score:2)
Americans pay more for drugs than do most people around the world... that is indifferent to subsides.
FDA regulations to say nothing of bans on imports of foreign drugs inflate American prices.
Beyond that, a huge portion of hospital bills do not go to doctors or medicine or medical equipment. A huge portion goes to administration. Simplifying medical paper work and streamlining hospital labor could radically lower costs.
We have test cases where shift nurses bypassed most of this stuff which had a dramatic im
Systemic debt is created by design (Score:2)
Trying to fix the broken process by setting fundraising site is comparable to the ransom collection by the pirates of the seas, figuratively speaking. Slashdot article mentioned this arrangement because this site collected $2,315 on average per person. Clearly, the concept was executed by the layer of society, who believes in Obamacare, basic income, and free healthcare. Money are collected by the people who have a network anyway. For people without the network this website is not a big help.
As far as stran
In saner societies (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean help Hospitals Pay UnPaid Medical Bills (Score:2)
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Tell me why I should care.. (Score:5, Insightful)
About an industry that can write off $40 billion and still make massive profits.
It's not like getting all $6 billion of our 'card and flower' money is going to make them drop prices one dime.
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Do not want (Score:2)
I do not support this project or the idea.
The figure "the U.S. healthcare industry writes off $40 billion in bad debt from unpaid medical bills" is disingenuous.
Because healthcare insurance pays all its bills [citation needed], then unpaid bills are only payable by uninsured folk. This represents the retail price, which is orders of magnitude higher than the average selling price (the price health insurance pays).
I do not recognize the authority of the healthcare industry to charge ruinously higher prices t
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In other words, this sounds like one of those "credit card counselling" scams which are funded by the credit card companies and advise you to pay back your credit card debt. Or the same exact scam for people thinking about not paying their underwater house mortgages.
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I do not support this project or the idea.
The figure "the U.S. healthcare industry writes off $40 billion in bad debt from unpaid medical bills" is disingenuous.
Because healthcare insurance pays all its bills [citation needed], then unpaid bills are only payable by uninsured folk.
And Bingo! You pretty much summed up the issue here. The US was caught in a positive feedback loop. As more Americans were falling off the insurance roles, they took to going to emergency rooms for their medical treatments. These people were getting the most expensive healthcare in the world for relatively minor illnesses as well as more major ones. I got to verify this during the last year of my father's life when he went to the ER a few times. There were a lot of people there who looked like they just ha
So basically, it's like universal health insurance (Score:2)
Collectively empathizing with people who have fallen on hard times due to sickness, and helping each other out by small donations to help pay those bills? So basically it's health insurance, except it's one that the poor can actually afford. Won't be nearly as effective because it isn't mandatory though.
Pathetic (Score:2)
The rest of the big boy and girl countries have figured this stuff out, and the US is reduced to begging.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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If the DNR was legally executed, then this is Medicare fraud. Did your family report this to the government or even to the local media?
Would we be paying medical bills or medical costs? (Score:2)
The doctor bills an uninsured patient gets have no relationship to the contracted amounts that would actually be paid for the same procedure (company plus patient copay) by an insurance company or government assistance. Indeed, the payment for a given procedure can be wildly different among insurance plans, even from one company.
Hospital bills are even less related to the actual amounts paid for procedures. No, your insurance company is not really paying $25 for each aspirin you got during your stay. That l
More proof (Score:2)
That America is fundamentally broken...
Blatant ripoffs (Score:5, Insightful)
When you take your car in to be serviced, the law requires that you be given a binding estimate of the costs involved before any work is done, and the mechanic is forbidden to exceed that estimate (within a small margin, like 10%) without getting your permission first. Mechanics who violate that law go to jail. Why do we not have those same kinds of consumer protections in the health care industry?
Pharmaceutical companies routinely charge people in the U.S. more for their products than in other countries, such that a drug which costs $100,000 for a full course of treatment in the U.S. costs only $5,000 in India, or scorpion antivenom that is billed at $40,000 a vial in the U.S. is available for $100 a vial in Mexico. Yet, if you were to go outside the country, buy those drugs, and bring them back to the U.S., you would go to prison, thanks to a law bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, a blatant infringement on the Doctrine of First Sale (which is that, once you buy something, it is yours to do with as you wish). The Supreme Court recently ruled (Kirtsaeng vs. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. ___ (2013), Docket No. 11-697) that this practice was impermissible in the textbook industry. Why, then, should it be permissible in the pharmaceutical industry?
If we were to get rid of all the special exemptions that the health care industry has under law, and force it to abide by the existing law of the land (such as the Sherman, Clayton, and Robinson-Patman Acts), including prison time for health care and insurance executives where applicable, the cost of health care would drop by 80% or more. Most people could then pay cash for their health care needs for about the same as they pay in a deductible today...meaning "health insurance" would no longer be necessary (except for "catastropic care" policies for unforeseen circumstances, which would cost about the same as your car insurance). Some form of Medicare and Medicaid would still be required for the truly less fortunate, but would cost a lot less. Obamacare would no longer be needed and could be trivially repealed. The economy would experience a massive boost because health care would no longer be draining it, and every government budget deficit problem, Federal, state, and local, would be instantly solved. (Leading to secondary effects such as stopping the erosion of your purchasing power because the government keeps "printing money" to fund its deficit spending.)
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"Are there no prisons?"
"Plenty of prisons..."
"And the Union workhouses." demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"
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Most other first world countries actually solves the financing through taxes so your income won't matter.
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And when the jail / prison system takes up the slack it will cost more.
Re: Repeal and Replace. (Score:5, Informative)
health is not something that can or should be traded on the free market.
America's healthcare system is about as far as you can get from a free market. Patients have no ability to compare prices, or even know what services cost when they are provided. If socialized medicine was the sole answer, America would have a wonderful healthcare system, because our government spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, and is near the top in per-capita government medical spending as well. Our medical system is bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic, and at 18% of GDP it is bigger than the entire economy of Canada. If our medical system became as efficient and effective as other developed countries, it would wipe out 10% of our economy, and eliminate the jobs of more than 7 million well paid people. There is a huge amount of inertia and resistance to change.
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Re: Repeal and Replace. (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, but what about the 3-year-old daughter of a colleague of mine with a brain tumor? Is that because she does drugs, or maybe she smokes?
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You can extrapolate that, to a wide variety of activities-
Got hit by a car - Were you jaywalking? Did you look both ways?
Fell off a ladder -
Re: Repeal and Replace. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually Americans as a proportion of there GDP spend more on health (2013 17.1%) than any other country exception of Tuvalu (19.7%) and America is one of richest countries in the world, per person it only it spends more any other country than except Switzerland and Norway (they obviously have a higher GDP per capita) yet Americans life expectancy is ranked 34th, Norway 9th, Switzerland 2nd. Clearly Americans are spending just more to get a worse health care. So who is squandering their money? Insurance companies by definition take their cut, of health care spending, it is in there interest to keep health care cost high so that they can sell insurance in the first place.
Ref: http://data.worldbank.org/indi... [worldbank.org] , http://data.worldbank.org/indi... [worldbank.org] , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
These are not extreme cases at all, these are normal cases, people get sick, mostly through no predictable fault of their own. Yes people could save and plan for something happening, but with 11 out of 12 cancer drugs costing more than $100,000 per year (http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/medical-costs/how-much-does-chemotherapy-cost/). The cost of a heart bypass surgery (which is not uncommon surgery) is $70,000-$200,000 without insurance, the main contributing factor to heart disease is genetics. Even the most fugal saver on an average income would probably be ruined by these expenses. This is not the cost of a luxury goods, unless you mean a Ferrari, and staying alive is not a luxury, it is by definition a necessity.
Providing health care to the poor, benefits everyone, rich included. Having a population with lots of unhealthy people can infect the rich as well, a virus does not look at the size of your bank balance before infecting you.
Re: Repeal and Replace. (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously you have perfect health, were not born with generic issues and have never needed to have your appendix removed, or never had emergency surgery for an anatomic issue that caused a medical emergency. Not all medical bills are caused by not taking care of yourself.
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Re: Repeal and Replace. (Score:5, Insightful)
Health is the responsibility of the person, not the community. Since the community has no say in how a person lives their life, whether that person smokes, gets drunk, uses drugs or is obese, why should the community be responsible to pay the medical bills for that person? Obviously the person doesn't care about their health or they wouldn't have chosen the lifestyle they lead.
A civilized society wouldn't force its citizens to hand over their money to protect those who choose to kill themselves through their own bad choices, especially when that society has endlessly informed its citizens about the dangers of such lifestyles choices.
Really - society bears no responsibility? Tell that to the people of Flint who have been poisoned by lead. Or the person walking down the street who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets shot/hit and run/raped?
These are not lifestyle choices.
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Like requiring a politicians to implement a decent health care system.
Anyway, that would be society's as a whole fault wouldn't it? So society as a whole should pay for it.
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The people of Flint are poisoned because they habitually elect corrupt city officials, just like the people of Detroit.
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Actually making it cheaper would probably have required a lot of things that were just not politically feasible at the time (like single payer/Medicare for all), considering how difficult even the messy patchwork of fixes that comprise the ACA/Obamacare was to get passed to begin with.
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Nah. My rates went up even faster. Then all of the decent private plans that existed in my state all got wiped out.
It's a shame that the Democrats didn't try to directly address the problems rather than trying to re-engineer the entire system. One obvious problem was the lack of will to have an actual Obamacare tax. Instead they created this horrible "individual mandate" president.
They gutted a number of well functioning state systems in the process. If the GOP does manage to get the ACA revoked, the collat
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Republicans need to stop using the wording Obamacare.
But sticking to that name makes it easier to then say "we replaced Obamacare with Ryancare", and try to convince people that there was an important difference between the two. So far, every "alternative" to the ACA that has been proposed by a sitting congressperson has been >90% similar in action to the ACA; most of them differing only in whose name would be on it. Otherwise if they were honest enough to say that they want to spend billions of dollars to repeal the ACA, then pass the ACA again, people
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Re: $6 billion is spent on cards and flowers (Score:2)
And also setting the value of those things to zero. I can't help but notice he's trying to get the hospitals paid their over-inflated bills.
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This is so completely and utterly backwards.
Aren't we all supposed to have quality insurance now? Why hasn't this problem gone away? Why are patients still being refused treatment because of economic circumstance?
I can't even.
No, we are all required to have insurance now and it has to include more things. We haven't fixed the ceiling, we've raised the floor.
Sentence: I officially degrade the USA to the status of 2nd world country.
Nope. If we were a 2nd world country (i.e. Communist), then we would have decent healthcare.
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So what would you rather have, a health-care system at the expense of some unneeded jobs, or a jobs-creation system at the expense of much-needed healthcare?
Or are you advocating for FDR style programs to employ Americans?