I read some senator or congress-person suggested before about doing medical tourism instead. Like you go visit Spain or Norway to get your knee or spine fixed for cheap.
This is the most Patrick Starr™ solutions I’ve ever heard for medical care.
Mexico has a large medical tourism industry. Mostly for dental but other things too.
You can go on a ferry and get a nice vacation in a fairly tropical area, and get your needs met medically and go home for less than it would cost in the states with insurance.
Maybe it was the Nestlé hospital?
Profit based healthcare is immoral.
Nonsense. Greed Is Good.
Capitalists are constantly telling me that if the Mayo Clinic wasn’t charging $5000 for saline drips, the service simply wouldn’t exist and he’d have died. This is what happens all the time in Communist Countries.
Besides, $5000 is a small price to pay for your life. If anything, he should have been charged extra. The hospital could have extorted him for five figures, easily, if they’d just twisted the screws a little tighter.
The real story is the surgeon had a problem with the hospital charging him so little. Only a broken system would miss that he could’ve paid well above $5000.
Praise be thy rules of acquisition.
Rule 10?
Really, did you need to go to the ER to know that? Shit has been broken for a while now.
Lots of people think it’s only the uninsured that get screwed, but it’s common to get a surprise 5,000 bill a few weeks after you’ve paid your copay.
But here’s the trick:
As of July 2022 the credit bureaus no longer report medical debt. So just don’t pay the greedy fuckers.
“Rich person doesn’t understand how to save money!”
Haha what a joker. Everyone knows you don’t go to the ER for lightheadedness. You gotta self medicate, use WebMD, and ride that wave until you can get seen by your grandmama, your buddy who’s a volunteer 1st responder, your friend’s wife who’s a nurse, or, if push comes to shove, the N.P. at the CVS Minute Clinic.
You never go full E.R. Gotta clip those coupons.
(Tongue in cheek.)
Sir if your tongue is your cheek, please see the surgeon in the article to remove.
You made me chuckle. Thanks!
Did he even get the full bill. Last time I went to an ER, I paid off something and then two years later got sent another bill. I called and said, this is a mistake, right? First lady said probably, everyone else said nope. This is your physician’s bill. The other one was a hospital bill. I asked, why did I then get it for the first time after a visit from TWO years ago?? What was goin on in the mean time? “Oh we were transitioning companies, probably something to do with that?” I tried to fight it, I got a reduced price, but that was so insane to me
I got hit with Lyme AFTER I lost my job last year. I got the bill for my ER visit, it sucked, but I was expecting it. To add insult to injury they sent me another bill, which was physician bill. The system is so fuvking stupid, it will kick you when you’re down. Next time I’m just flying to Europe somewhere to get a treatment.
I wonder if he just noticed because it’s been capitalist hellscape for a long time now. Welcome to the trenches, fellow working class member. Your ability to have basic healthcare is based entirely around your ability to scrape enough money together between hospital visits. Failure to do so will have lifelong impacts, so I suggest you start eating cereal for dinner to save some cash for the next time you need basic human help.
Feature not a bug
Why didn’t he just go to one of them spa and get a $150 iv drip
You mean those mobile IV vans? Those are only in major cities and when you’re suffering dehydration from like a stomach virus you don’t have time to schedule an appointment if you’re dying.
Treatment for dehydration should absolutely be added to free essential care under Obamacare, at a minimum.
In my area it’s not a van but a brand with a bunch of locations all over they do like freeze therapy and all sorts of iv drips. Definitely further away than the nearest hospital but we also shouldn’t need to go to a hospital for things like this that can be handled at walk in clinics if insurance companies would start offering better pay to those types of business.
Make Congress abide by the healthcare they make us abide by and this will be fixed overnight.
Quite literally
They live on a different planet. Our representatives are completely out of touch and there’s no bringing them back. For the few good ones there are 99 career polticians out there carving out a niche for themselves and their families.
Who watches the watchmen? Well I’ve come up with a new branch named aptly:
The Duty Takers
99% agreed. I don’t believe there are currently any “good ones”. Everyone thinks “their guy” is going good and the rest suck and it’s why we never have change in the guard.
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“Here’s a bottle of water, that’ll be $5000. Have a nice day.”
It was probably Pedialyte
Intravenous Pedialyte, I love it. Wish they added Red 8 and Blue 40 to IV bags to make them more fun and so that my kids begged to go and get IV drips.
Don’t forget the carbonation for cool looking bubbles!
Why, yes.
I have a little experience with the medical billing system for this fantastic country that I’m lucky and unlucky enough not to live in (yes, both lucky and unlucky; different reasons).
It’s messed up. There are band-aids in place to keep costs down for charges billed to medicare and medicaid, but that just makes the whole thing worse because it adds a lot of extra complexity and everyone else likely gets fleeced to make up for the new overhead. The medicare 8 minute rule itself isn’t that complex, but add modifiers for activities performed by different providers (in therapy, this could be a PT and a PTA providing the same service, for different lengths of time, on the same visit)? It goes NUTS.
Single payer healthcare with optional private coverage would solve nearly everything. The cost to the patient first and foremost, but also the cost to the government itself, due to greatly decreased complexity. And private clinics and private insurance don’t have to disappear, they can still provide more high-end services, or shorter wait times, for those who can ACTUALLY AFFORD IT.
Only $5000? He got lucky.
Yeah… Because there’s no place for downward pressure on health expenses. Hospitals are incentivized to raise prices as much as possible, because they know insurance companies will negotiate downwards. Insurance companies pass all costs back down to the pool while working as hard as possible to deny everything. Drug companies know they have a captive market, nobody else is making that medicine you need for survival so “Cha-Ching!”. Employers are looking for the cheapest health plans possible which means the shittiest plans for their employees. And any company that sells medical equipment is looking at selling it for as much money as possible (or in a “package” that gets hospitals to overcharge on individually wrapped tylenol). Hospital Admins spend more time and money to make sure patients are charged $20 for a $0.10 pill than they trying to keep enough doctors and nurses on staff.
Medicare for all, that’s the only way to start righting the ship here. Nationalizing the entire healthcare system would be the next step. It’s beyond stupid that we run healthcare for profit.
So it’s actually more complicated than that (at least to your first point, the points about drug companies is accurate). First, I support M4A, especially plans like Bernie’s that improved reimbursement. One major issue is that the government (Medicaid in particular, Medicare also) pays below costs in some cases. So hospitals charge a shit ton to commercial insurance to make up for their loss on other patients.
In terms of employers saving money, most large employers have moved to self-insurance (70-80%, depending on how you define “large”).
In a single payer system, why would how much the payer pays for service matter, on a per service basis? The payer may as well just run the entire system. Essentially, an integrated delivery network (like Kaiser Permanente) on a national scale.
I don’t mean this in a condescending way, but that’s a great question. Lmk if my answer isn’t clear and I can elaborate more.
Single payer is not nationalized healthcare. Those are two different models with very different implications for funding.
Any business could buy up their downstream suppliers, just like the government could nationalize hospitals. But most governments (and most businesses) don’t do that.
In a single payer system, hospitals would get paid from one source, plus supplemental services that people buy out of pocket. What a hospital gets paid impacts what they can pay their employees. Ever heard someone say “why would they be an EMT for $15 an hour when they could make that flipping burgers?” It’s the same logic. Private companies lobby single payer govts so that they can attract employees, among other things they can do with money. More money makes running anything in a capitalist society easier.
If you’re nationalized, then the healthcare workers are government employees.
