The Free Market for Health Care Works

It certainly could be, but it's not politically feasible and doubtfully ever will be. I don't want to go into it, because it would take a very long book to address all the issues.

We could make it more like a market which would do a lot to help with exploding costs.



The government's limits on supply don't help there. Again, that's somewhat of a tangent while I am primarily focusing here on who pays. But, why is it you can't buy insurance out of state? There are lot's of ill advised government policies for which I can at least see the good intent. But, this one, I can't imagine why anyone other than insurers thought that was a good idea.



I have never gone to see a doctor on Wall Street. Do they have good one's there? :)

Obviously, insurance (private or public) has to play a part but we should at least equalize all health care costs for tax purposes instead of promoting some, that have failed miserably, over others.

Yes, if you are rich and willing to pay for it you are going to get better care, just as you would get better services/goods in other areas. Under a heavily controlled government system the powerful and those connected to the powerful are going to receive better care. Why is that better? At least in the market you are the one paying.

I just had a thought. I wonder if a system where the patient paid for most care (maybe out of a fund that could pull or roll over into retirement funds, including ss) with a government paying for catastrophic coverage would work?

Personally, I like the HSA accounts. The purpose of medical insurance in my opinion is to cover those catastrophic costs. My HSA does just that, with 100% coverage on anything beyond my deductible. By investing in the HSA account, you can put money tax deferred into the platform. If you don't use the deductible in a given year, it rolls over. You don't lose it.

When you are spending your own money for the care, you tend to be more frugal. ie... you are not running to the doctor every time you get the sniffles. Preventative care is included in my plan.

An added bonus for me is that you can actually invest the HSA assets in the market/bonds/gold etc... that money grows tax free so long as it comes out for medical expenses. (it does get taxed if it is for non-medical)

I started out with a $1500 deductible HSA plan. As the assets went up in my HSA I shifted in subsequent years to a $2500 and then $5k deductible. I now pay just under $100 per month for my plan.

This is also an individual plan... not company... which is why it is so much lower. (caveat...it does not have guaranteed coverage, you have to qualify)
 
Free markets in healthcare is contradictory to the laws of common sense, basic morality, and economics.


NOBODY should have the power or legal right to say, "Your money or your life." It's illegal if you do it at gunpoint, andf it should also be illegal if you do it at pen-point.
 
"Sheesh, I'm having a heart attack. I think I'm going to go on Angie's list and figure out what doctor best specializes in this..."

"St. Mary's - the BEST prices on stints!"

i hate to admit it, but i have to agree with WM....you can't compare elective surgery to most h/c issues.....
 
Yeah, it's retarded to say that because you can shop around to see who does the best lip injections means the free market applies at all to a guy down for the count after a coronary.

None of the free market mechanisms that allow for robust competition apply. Price shopping/negotiation, you can't go to school and learn to operate on yourself after your appendix bursts, you don't get to decide any of these things. This isn't like buying a television.

Free market theology is dead and gone from reasonable discourse on healthcare.
 
Yeah, it's retarded to say that because you can shop around to see who does the best lip injections means the free market applies at all to a guy down for the count after a coronary.

None of the free market mechanisms that allow for robust competition apply. Price shopping/negotiation, you can't go to school and learn to operate on yourself after your appendix bursts, you don't get to decide any of these things. This isn't like buying a television.

Free market theology is dead and gone from reasonable discourse on healthcare.

why aren't those who are forced to pay for auto insurance rising up against mandated auto insurance? is it because there is no government auto option plan? and i agree with you, i do not believe h/c is something the free market is capable of dealing with.

further, why is it obama is trying to create this whole new 'public option'....i know we talked about this before, but why not simply expand the current public option....medicare..... is it because medicare is not doing well and people do not have faith in it so obama is trying to sell some new public option that as we both know could very well end up as medicare....
 
why aren't those who are forced to pay for auto insurance rising up against mandated auto insurance? is it because there is no government auto option plan? and i agree with you, i do not believe h/c is something the free market is capable of dealing with.

further, why is it obama is trying to create this whole new 'public option'....i know we talked about this before, but why not simply expand the current public option....medicare..... is it because medicare is not doing well and people do not have faith in it so obama is trying to sell some new public option that as we both know could very well end up as medicare....

Most of Obama's liberal base would agree with you on expanding medicare. It's otherwise known as single payer and that issue is DOA in Washington for all the same reasons we probably won't get a public option.

It's not because people don't trust medicare. People who have it LOVE medicare. It's got a funding problem, but it's administered very well and it does its job very well by way of servicing the elderly. It's not the public he's trying to convince. 2/3s of the public support the public option. It's congress, bought and paid for by the health care lobby, that needs convincing.
 
E=ib1yysguy;533059]Most of Obama's liberal base would agree with you on expanding medicare. It's otherwise known as single payer and that issue is DOA in Washington for all the same reasons we probably won't get a public option.

i don't believe expanding medicare makes our system a single payer system....unless we abolish all other forms of private party pay and pay all health insurance through the government....vis a vis taxes

It's not because people don't trust medicare. People who have it LOVE medicare. It's got a funding problem, but it's administered very well and it does its job very well by way of servicing the elderly. It's not the public he's trying to convince. 2/3s of the public support the public option. It's congress, bought and paid for by the health care lobby, that needs convincing.

good point....but here is my big question: the funding....why create a new funding problem....why not fix the current system?

and you are right, many love medicare, including the wealthy, i would say more but it would breach confidentiality
 
i don't believe expanding medicare makes our system a single payer system....unless we abolish all other forms of private party pay and pay all health insurance through the government....vis a vis taxes

Not the case. Germany has a single payer system with supplemental private insurances. Even Medicare recipients have access to supplemental private insurance for things like eyes and dental.



good point....but here is my big question: the funding....why create a new funding problem....why not fix the current system?

and you are right, many love medicare, including the wealthy, i would say more but it would breach confidentiality

We can do both - we can fix the current funding problem with Medicare and create a system by which we can insure the rest of America.

You know what the CBO said the Baucus bill would do to the deficit? And do you have any idea how the Republicans are trying to spin away from it?

Here's a hint: they said the CBO report doesn't matter because the Baucus bill is already dead (because they killed it by saying it would be too expensive).

Here he is:
 
None of the free market mechanisms that allow for robust competition apply. Price shopping/negotiation, you can't go to school and learn to operate on yourself after your appendix bursts, you don't get to decide any of these things. This isn't like buying a television.

Free market theology is dead and gone from reasonable discourse on healthcare.


And you can learn to give yourself a boob job? What?
 
why aren't those who are forced to pay for auto insurance rising up against mandated auto insurance? is it because there is no government auto option plan? and i agree with you, i do not believe h/c is something the free market is capable of dealing with.

No one is forced to buy auto insurance.

The free market can certainly handle health care.
 
OTE=ib1yysguy;533076]Not the case. Germany has a single payer system with supplemental private insurances. Even Medicare recipients have access to supplemental private insurance for things like eyes and dental.

ok...what does single payer mean to you then.....


We can do both - we can fix the current funding problem with Medicare and create a system by which we can insure the rest of America.

You know what the CBO said the Baucus bill would do to the deficit? And do you have any idea how the Republicans are trying to spin away from it?

Here's a hint: they said the CBO report doesn't matter because the Baucus bill is already dead (because they killed it by saying it would be too expensive).

Here he is:
[/QUOTE]

any solutions or just more of "yes we can" ? all you said was negative, you bashed plans, not offered one......
 
right.....so no one.....has...to drive a car.....i used the argument once....and now i know i was wrong...

Does not change the fact that you are not forced to buy car insurance. Further, the state requirement for car insurance before you may legally drive on government roads is at the state level, while this one is a federal mandate, where the feds clearly have no constitutional power.
 
ok...what does single payer mean to you then.....

any solutions or just more of "yes we can" ? all you said was negative, you bashed plans, not offered one......[/QUOTE]

The solution is being worked out right now. The answer to the question that you ignored is that the Baucus bill will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.

That seems like a great solution for finding the money for Medicare right there.
 
I think Americans have got it right!

Healthcare for those who can afford it! Let wealth be American Healthcare's 'Death Panels'!

It can work as a form of Social Darwinism, those who aren't fit for survival (ie those who cannot afford) should be left to die, then there would be fewer poor people!
 
Try and get a price quote for a medical procedure before getting it done.

Other than cosmetic as previously stated.

For free market to work, consumers need to have information to make an informed decision on.

I tried to do just that before I okayed Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy surgery to help with my Parkinson's. I let Johns Hopkins know that price was definitely an object, and there was a limit to how much out of pocket cost I could afford, and that limit was right around $1,000. They told me it wasn't their practice to discuss the cost of their services beforehand, and I told them that any expenditure of that size, whether surgery or remodeling your home, required an estimate, in order that the consumer be able to make an informed decision. They repeated, we don't give estimates. So much for the free market in health care. The free market requires that the buyer be made aware of the price of that which he is considering purchase, does it not? The refusal to give a hard estimate, if done in the home remodeling industry is a sure sign of incipient fraud. Fraud is still a crime, at least officially. I told them if they wanted to have the revenue from the procedure, which my online research told me was in the neighborhood of a quarter million USD (nice neighborhood, btw), THEY WERE GOING TO HAVE TO GIVE ME AN ESTIMATE OF THE OUT OF POCKET COSTS I COULD EXPECT, becsause if the cost was significantly higher than my $1,000 limit, I would pass on the surgery. The last young lady I talked to seemed unusually cooperative, given her compatriots' intransigence on the matter, came back immediately with a figure just under a grand. I said do it. When the bills started coming in, the total out of pocket was well over $11,000. I asked them exactly which part of "I can only afford $1,000 out of pocket for the procedure" they didn't understand. They said there were two procedures, that the young lady who had given me the quote weassn't authorized to do so, and what was her name? I lied and told them I didn't write it down (no sense in letting them fire a potential witness). They told me the quote she had given me was for the first procedure. I said WTF? It was sold to me as one procedure with two stages: the first in which the wires were implanted in thr brain (for which I would be awake for the entire operation...a FUCKING NIGHTMARE, but I won't get into that now), and the second in which the pulse generator would be implanted in my chest and the cable run from the generator up my neck and behind my left ear to the wires under my scalp. They tried to claim that was two seperate procedures. I went off.

To make matters worse, the surgeon broke one of the implant wires during the second stage, so the goddamn thing never worked properly even though my neurologist, who sold me on the surgery in the first place AND was the first person the surgeon called after he fucked up, told me it worked fine. I went to Georgetown University Medical Center for a second opinion. They got some odd readings from the system, so they turned the pulse generator off, checked the system again, and got an impedance reading of 4,000 ohms with the system off. For those of you not familiar with electrical circuits, there should be no impedance reading on an open circuit. Impedance or continuity means the circuit is either closed or has a short to ground, andf when the ground is your brain, this is no small concern. The folks at Georgetown told me to leave the system tuned off, and set an appointment for me with one of their neurosurgeons for the next day (a Saturday, no less),and did x-rays and a CAt scan right then and there, so he could see them before we met. Georgetown UMC is a great hospital, btw. It's a magnet nursing school, and therefore a nurse's hospital, and it shows in their attitude toward the patient. When you are in the waiting room, they don't just call your name and have a nurse escort you to an examining room to cool your heels for 23-30 minutes waiting for as doctor to appear. The FREAKING DOCTOR COMES OUT TO GET YOU, and usually within 5 minutes of the appointed time. This is in contrast to Johns Hopkins, which is a fine hospital, but it's a surgeon's hospital, and they tend to be a tad arrogant. Oh, and one more thing: when I met with the neurosurgeon at GUMC, he had none of the arrogance of the asshole at Hopkins who botched the original procedure (and you should have seen that jerk shuck and jive and call me "boss" after he fucked up). The surgeon at GUMC actually had a bedside manner AND a personality. When I asked him how much it would cost to remove the system, he told me to call the hospital Monday afternon, that he would have all the info to them for pricing first thing Monday morning. When I called, I was quoted a total cost of $20,000 to remove the system, which included 23 hour post-op observation, so it was still outpatient surgery (all hospitals do that...it's a sign of the greed built into the system), and my out of pocket cost, since i had already met the Medicare deductible for the year was right at a grand. I said, "No surprises?" She said, "We aren't Hopkins." (Oh, snap!!). After the procedure, the neurosurgeon came to the recovery room, and told me it had been a piece of cake, that there was no n eed for the added cost of 23 hours of observation, "So get the hell out of here. You can still avoid the lunch rush at Filomena Ristorante if you hustle. It's on Wisconsin Ave, a block from M Street toward the riverfront." I said, "COOL!! Thank you! We're outta here." My bill for out of pocket was $400.

Back to the saga of Zoom vs Johns Hopkins: After severl fruitless phone calls to them, I wrote a scathing letter to them, ripping them a new one for their attitude, their near refusal to quote me any kind of price at all, the bogus estimate they gave me when I told them, "No estimate, no surgery," and their absolute intransigence at making things right, especially since they botched the procedure sufficiently that it could have killed me, and talked about taking action on their malpractice. A hospital official told me that I had no chance on the malpractice, SINCE I HADN'T DIED (so much for malpractice being the culprit in the obscene increases in the cost of health care...and don't even try to argue the point with me...I've done my homework on the topic, and I'll embarrass anybody who tries to run their corporater talking points by me with a good, old-fashioned verbal ass-whuppin'. Don't believe it? Try me.). He also said that he was turning my account over to a collections agency if it wasn't paid immediately, and in full. I sent another letter, this time to Johns Hopkins University as well, since JHU was the billing agent for the doctors, in which I mentioned that I had been told by the surgeon that "Medicare pays me plenty for these procedures, so I don't balance bill," and yet right there on the bill was a balance-billed charge for $1,000, so i raised hell about that AND repeated the malpractice angle, but changed it a little, saying, "I may not be able to beat you in a court of law over this outrageous bullshit, but I'm going to bet that I can crush you in the court of public opinion. I'll just contact Paul Berry and see if my case qualifies for one of his "Seven on Your Side" features (Berry is one of the anchors on channel 7, the ABC affiliate in DC). The surgeon took his charge off the bill, but the total was still in excess of $10,000. Then the phone calls from the collections agency started, but I have to admit I actually kind of enjoyed that. After I politely told the lady who first called that I wasn't going to send them anything, that I was still fighting with the hospital over the amount of the bill, she asked if I would hold for her supervisor. I did, and was rewarded with this deep, oleaginous voice from which all trace of an identifiable regional accent had been studiously scrubbed just prior to the addition of the 6 qts of 10W40, telling me that he wanted to work with me on this matter, and if I would give him my bank's routing number and my checking account number, he would make sure my credit rating wasn't damaged because of my late payment (I told him I didn't appreciate his thinly veild threat, to which he replied, "well, then, maybe you should have paid your bill." Now, I'm pissed. I said, "In the first place, this is not bad faith on my part, but a legitimate disagreement over the size of the bill..." He cut me off, saying, "I don't care what your story is. Are you going tp work with me, or do i need to take steps toward lowering your credit rating?" I laughed at him, "go ahead. Do whatever you want, chuckles. You don't scare me, because I'm legally blind and can't drive, so I don't need to buy a car. My cabin is free and clear, I have all the computer and a/v equipment I could ever want, and I'm divorced. If you had checked out my credit before you decided to run the bad-ass act by me, you would know all that, so why don't you just take your empty threats, and call somebody who gives a shit?" Stunned silence. "Man, this just isn't your day, is it? I bet it's not often that somebody tells you to go pound sand. Oh, yeah, and don't call here aqain. Buh-bye." Damn, that felt good.

It felt even better when I got a call from JHU the next day, from the office of a guy who gets the University to write off hospital bills in cases involving indigence or (cough, cough) bad P/R. He noted that i had already paid $400 to the hospital, and said he was going to journal entry that money over to the University to pay the doctors, and if I would send a check made out to JHU to his attention to pay the remainder of the doctors' bills, he would clear off my debt to the hospital. I asked how much he wanted, and he said $575. I said that was great, but I was curious as to why the sudden change of heart? He said, "Your letter was bouncing around, and finally landed on the right desk."

"Yours?"

"No, actually, my contact at the hospital, who knows what to send to me and when, and your letter raised some very serious issues, and caused reactions that were even more serious."

"Such as?"

"Such as your surgeon waiving his fee. It's illegal for him to offer you a discount that he hasn't already offered to Medicare."

"And i noticed there are ads on ABC for a new reality series called "Hopkins" starting in three weeks."

He sighed, "Yeah, that was definitely a consideration. The fact that you went to Georgetown for a second opinion, and they found a potentially fatal flaw in our work and had to remove it, while we were dunning you for payment and turning you over to an agency for collection doesn't make us look good."

"Speaking of which..."

"I'll call them, and if you get any calls from anybody at the hospital about your bill, refer them to me."

The for-profit health care system put me through the wringer, and I have Medicare, who pays legitimate bills without question, but the for-profit system has corrupted even that, by finding loopholes in the Medicare regs, and changing their procedure coding to take advantage of them.
 
I think Americans have got it right!

Healthcare for those who can afford it! Let wealth be American Healthcare's 'Death Panels'!

It can work as a form of Social Darwinism, those who aren't fit for survival (ie those who cannot afford) should be left to die, then there would be fewer poor people!
Now here's somebody I haven't seen in a while....

'Sup?
 
Georgetown UMC is a great hospital, btw. It's a magnet nursing school, and therefore a nurse's hospital, and it shows in their attitude toward the patient.

Even my being a universal medical proponent I can definitely see paying an out-of-pocket premium for that! :D

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I tried to do just that before I okayed Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy surgery to help with my Parkinson's. I let Johns Hopkins know that price was definitely an object, and there was a limit to how much out of pocket cost I could afford, and that limit was right around $1,000. They told me it wasn't their practice to discuss the cost of their services beforehand, and I told them that any expenditure of that size, whether surgery or remodeling your home, required an estimate, in order that the consumer be able to make an informed decision. They repeated, we don't give estimates. So much for the free market in health care. The free market requires that the buyer be made aware of the price of that which he is considering purchase, does it not? The refusal to give a hard estimate, if done in the home remodeling industry is a sure sign of incipient fraud. Fraud is still a crime, at least officially. I told them if they wanted to have the revenue from the procedure, which my online research told me was in the neighborhood of a quarter million USD (nice neighborhood, btw), THEY WERE GOING TO HAVE TO GIVE ME AN ESTIMATE OF THE OUT OF POCKET COSTS I COULD EXPECT, becsause if the cost was significantly higher than my $1,000 limit, I would pass on the surgery. The last young lady I talked to seemed unusually cooperative, given her compatriots' intransigence on the matter, came back immediately with a figure just under a grand. I said do it. When the bills started coming in, the total out of pocket was well over $11,000. I asked them exactly which part of "I can only afford $1,000 out of pocket for the procedure" they didn't understand. They said there were two procedures, that the young lady who had given me the quote weassn't authorized to do so, and what was her name? I lied and told them I didn't write it down (no sense in letting them fire a potential witness). They told me the quote she had given me was for the first procedure. I said WTF? It was sold to me as one procedure with two stages: the first in which the wires were implanted in thr brain (for which I would be awake for the entire operation...a FUCKING NIGHTMARE, but I won't get into that now), and the second in which the pulse generator would be implanted in my chest and the cable run from the generator up my neck and behind my left ear to the wires under my scalp. They tried to claim that was two seperate procedures. I went off.

To make matters worse, the surgeon broke one of the implant wires during the second stage, so the goddamn thing never worked properly even though my neurologist, who sold me on the surgery in the first place AND was the first person the surgeon called after he fucked up, told me it worked fine. I went to Georgetown University Medical Center for a second opinion. They got some odd readings from the system, so they turned the pulse generator off, checked the system again, and got an impedance reading of 4,000 ohms with the system off. For those of you not familiar with electrical circuits, there should be no impedance reading on an open circuit. Impedance or continuity means the circuit is either closed or has a short to ground, andf when the ground is your brain, this is no small concern. The folks at Georgetown told me to leave the system tuned off, and set an appointment for me with one of their neurosurgeons for the next day (a Saturday, no less),and did x-rays and a CAt scan right then and there, so he could see them before we met. Georgetown UMC is a great hospital, btw. It's a magnet nursing school, and therefore a nurse's hospital, and it shows in their attitude toward the patient. When you are in the waiting room, they don't just call your name and have a nurse escort you to an examining room to cool your heels for 23-30 minutes waiting for as doctor to appear. The FREAKING DOCTOR COMES OUT TO GET YOU, and usually within 5 minutes of the appointed time. This is in contrast to Johns Hopkins, which is a fine hospital, but it's a surgeon's hospital, and they tend to be a tad arrogant. Oh, and one more thing: when I met with the neurosurgeon at GUMC, he had none of the arrogance of the asshole at Hopkins who botched the original procedure (and you should have seen that jerk shuck and jive and call me "boss" after he fucked up). The surgeon at GUMC actually had a bedside manner AND a personality. When I asked him how much it would cost to remove the system, he told me to call the hospital Monday afternon, that he would have all the info to them for pricing first thing Monday morning. When I called, I was quoted a total cost of $20,000 to remove the system, which included 23 hour post-op observation, so it was still outpatient surgery (all hospitals do that...it's a sign of the greed built into the system), and my out of pocket cost, since i had already met the Medicare deductible for the year was right at a grand. I said, "No surprises?" She said, "We aren't Hopkins." (Oh, snap!!). After the procedure, the neurosurgeon came to the recovery room, and told me it had been a piece of cake, that there was no n eed for the added cost of 23 hours of observation, "So get the hell out of here. You can still avoid the lunch rush at Filomena Ristorante if you hustle. It's on Wisconsin Ave, a block from M Street toward the riverfront." I said, "COOL!! Thank you! We're outta here." My bill for out of pocket was $400.

Back to the saga of Zoom vs Johns Hopkins: After severl fruitless phone calls to them, I wrote a scathing letter to them, ripping them a new one for their attitude, their near refusal to quote me any kind of price at all, the bogus estimate they gave me when I told them, "No estimate, no surgery," and their absolute intransigence at making things right, especially since they botched the procedure sufficiently that it could have killed me, and talked about taking action on their malpractice. A hospital official told me that I had no chance on the malpractice, SINCE I HADN'T DIED (so much for malpractice being the culprit in the obscene increases in the cost of health care...and don't even try to argue the point with me...I've done my homework on the topic, and I'll embarrass anybody who tries to run their corporater talking points by me with a good, old-fashioned verbal ass-whuppin'. Don't believe it? Try me.). He also said that he was turning my account over to a collections agency if it wasn't paid immediately, and in full. I sent another letter, this time to Johns Hopkins University as well, since JHU was the billing agent for the doctors, in which I mentioned that I had been told by the surgeon that "Medicare pays me plenty for these procedures, so I don't balance bill," and yet right there on the bill was a balance-billed charge for $1,000, so i raised hell about that AND repeated the malpractice angle, but changed it a little, saying, "I may not be able to beat you in a court of law over this outrageous bullshit, but I'm going to bet that I can crush you in the court of public opinion. I'll just contact Paul Berry and see if my case qualifies for one of his "Seven on Your Side" features (Berry is one of the anchors on channel 7, the ABC affiliate in DC). The surgeon took his charge off the bill, but the total was still in excess of $10,000. Then the phone calls from the collections agency started, but I have to admit I actually kind of enjoyed that. After I politely told the lady who first called that I wasn't going to send them anything, that I was still fighting with the hospital over the amount of the bill, she asked if I would hold for her supervisor. I did, and was rewarded with this deep, oleaginous voice from which all trace of an identifiable regional accent had been studiously scrubbed just prior to the addition of the 6 qts of 10W40, telling me that he wanted to work with me on this matter, and if I would give him my bank's routing number and my checking account number, he would make sure my credit rating wasn't damaged because of my late payment (I told him I didn't appreciate his thinly veild threat, to which he replied, "well, then, maybe you should have paid your bill." Now, I'm pissed. I said, "In the first place, this is not bad faith on my part, but a legitimate disagreement over the size of the bill..." He cut me off, saying, "I don't care what your story is. Are you going tp work with me, or do i need to take steps toward lowering your credit rating?" I laughed at him, "go ahead. Do whatever you want, chuckles. You don't scare me, because I'm legally blind and can't drive, so I don't need to buy a car. My cabin is free and clear, I have all the computer and a/v equipment I could ever want, and I'm divorced. If you had checked out my credit before you decided to run the bad-ass act by me, you would know all that, so why don't you just take your empty threats, and call somebody who gives a shit?" Stunned silence. "Man, this just isn't your day, is it? I bet it's not often that somebody tells you to go pound sand. Oh, yeah, and don't call here aqain. Buh-bye." Damn, that felt good.

It felt even better when I got a call from JHU the next day, from the office of a guy who gets the University to write off hospital bills in cases involving indigence or (cough, cough) bad P/R. He noted that i had already paid $400 to the hospital, and said he was going to journal entry that money over to the University to pay the doctors, and if I would send a check made out to JHU to his attention to pay the remainder of the doctors' bills, he would clear off my debt to the hospital. I asked how much he wanted, and he said $575. I said that was great, but I was curious as to why the sudden change of heart? He said, "Your letter was bouncing around, and finally landed on the right desk."

"Yours?"

"No, actually, my contact at the hospital, who knows what to send to me and when, and your letter raised some very serious issues, and caused reactions that were even more serious."

"Such as?"

"Such as your surgeon waiving his fee. It's illegal for him to offer you a discount that he hasn't already offered to Medicare."

"And i noticed there are ads on ABC for a new reality series called "Hopkins" starting in three weeks."

He sighed, "Yeah, that was definitely a consideration. The fact that you went to Georgetown for a second opinion, and they found a potentially fatal flaw in our work and had to remove it, while we were dunning you for payment and turning you over to an agency for collection doesn't make us look good."

"Speaking of which..."

"I'll call them, and if you get any calls from anybody at the hospital about your bill, refer them to me."

The for-profit health care system put me through the wringer, and I have Medicare, who pays legitimate bills without question, but the for-profit system has corrupted even that, by finding loopholes in the Medicare regs, and changing their procedure coding to take advantage of them.
 
any solutions or just more of "yes we can" ? all you said was negative, you bashed plans, not offered one......

The solution is being worked out right now. The answer to the question that you ignored is that the Baucus bill will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.

That seems like a great solution for finding the money for Medicare right there.[/QUOTE]

you never answered what single payer means to you....could that be because i was right......:)
 
The solution is being worked out right now. The answer to the question that you ignored is that the Baucus bill will reduce the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars.

That seems like a great solution for finding the money for Medicare right there.

you never answered what single payer means to you....could that be because i was right......:)[/QUOTE]

There's no "what it means to me." Single payer has a very specific definition I shouldn't need to explain to you.

89 Billion is what the Baucus bill saves and it insures 25 million more people. HMMM

I don't support the Baucus bill, however. It needs to go further.
 
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