Between the party of Hoover, which thinks that it is just peachy that 46 million Americans do not have health insurance, the goons in the insurance industry who are trying to kill any move to change the current execrable system, the big pharmaceutical companies and the politicians on both sides of the aisle with ties to the health industry, do not expect anything to change anytime soon.
The entire system is steeped in corruption and fraud. Please indulge me in a personal example (which I possibly have told before- sue me):
Some years ago, I found myself in the ER early one morning. (The "why" is irrelevant.) I was there for eight hours. The overall bill for those eight hours was roughly $7,000. My co-pay was about $125. Insurance paid about $800. The rest of the bill was wiped out as part of the agreement between the insurance company and the providers.
$7,000 billed, $925 paid. $6,000 just "vanished," since the insurance company had negotiated a much lower rate by the "you don't agree to take this, none of our insureds will go to you" method.
Now say that I had no health insurance. Those bastards in the hospital would have gone after me for $7,000. If I had settled with them for less, say $3,000, the bastards would have sent me a Form 1099 for $4,000 and I would have had to pay income tax on that. If I gave them a phony name and stiffed them, the hospital would have added $7,000 to their claim of "see how much we spend on the uninsured."
All of that is bullshit, because they get paid less, a lot less, by every insurer out there. But the fictional number of how much it costs to provide medical services for uninsured people, is what is driving the health insurance debate. It is nothing short of fraud on the part of the white-coated professionals.
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!!??--If those numbers are in any way typical, the system's a lot closer to collapse than I suspected. Better have my affairs in order for when the pandemic hits...
About 2 1/2 years ago, I was working .49 at the local university. .49 means you're just less than half time, so they don't have to provide benefits. Then I had an infection that sent to the emergency room, then the operating room, then a day in intensive care, then two days of intensive monitoring, antibiotics, and pain meds, before they allowed me to go home. They told me that I had been in the process of going into shock, and if I had gone to bed (as I had been intending), I would have died before morning. Within the next few months I was diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes and suffered some sort of CNS trauma, probably a mini stroke, which have all gone untreated for the last couple of years. I have no idea what the cost was; at the time I hadn't yet gone through all the bureaucratic BS to get the keys to my mail box from the frikkin' post office. My guesstimate is in the range of 20 to 30 K. I don't have the strength to work, nor the acuity to do what I used to do. My family sends me almost (but not quite) enough to keep a roof over my head, food in my belly, and a couple of coffees each day, so I can hang out at my coffee shop, read the intertubez, and socialize, rather than rotting in my apartment alone.
The conservatives have it right: I choose not to have insurance. It's so much more fun to be a burden on my family and society.
Sorry if this comes across as a whiny rant, but there it is.
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