geauxtohell
Choose your weapon.
If people truly had to pay the cost of healthcare, few people could really afford it. The current system is a giant insurance shell game where hospitals and insurance companies shuttle money around and overcharge for cheap procedures to cover the loss they incur treating people at the end of life or for catastrophic illness.
This is how it basically works: Say you have a health insurance policy that caps out at $500,000 dollars and you get sepsis and spend 20 days in the hospital and the total bill is $1,000,000. Your insurance is going to pay out the policy cap $500,000 and now the hospital is stuck with a $500,000 dollar bill. They come after your estate for the money, but that means that hospitals would, in essence, become like banks and spend a ton of time suing and acquiring peoples personal assets to recoup losses. That's bad PR and bad public policy. So they don't do that. Instead, a guy comes in for a minor stitch job that should probably cost around 500-700 dollars and his insurance pays out $1200 for it with a wink and a nod between the hospital. It's a huge systematic price inflation game that has been going on for decades.
It's funny to listen to people bitch about medicaid, when in reality, private insurance is the culprit.
On that note, if these dumb-asses had their way and eleminated Medicaid, they would fuck up the whole system. A large percentage of graduate (medical school) and post graduate (residency) training is done in community hospitals that service medicaid populations. Your doctor most likely learned medicine because of medicaid.
I don't pretend to know the answer to the question or the solution to the problem. But some of the people that rant about this shit (i.e. "death panels") have absolutely no clue how it works.
This is how it basically works: Say you have a health insurance policy that caps out at $500,000 dollars and you get sepsis and spend 20 days in the hospital and the total bill is $1,000,000. Your insurance is going to pay out the policy cap $500,000 and now the hospital is stuck with a $500,000 dollar bill. They come after your estate for the money, but that means that hospitals would, in essence, become like banks and spend a ton of time suing and acquiring peoples personal assets to recoup losses. That's bad PR and bad public policy. So they don't do that. Instead, a guy comes in for a minor stitch job that should probably cost around 500-700 dollars and his insurance pays out $1200 for it with a wink and a nod between the hospital. It's a huge systematic price inflation game that has been going on for decades.
It's funny to listen to people bitch about medicaid, when in reality, private insurance is the culprit.
On that note, if these dumb-asses had their way and eleminated Medicaid, they would fuck up the whole system. A large percentage of graduate (medical school) and post graduate (residency) training is done in community hospitals that service medicaid populations. Your doctor most likely learned medicine because of medicaid.
I don't pretend to know the answer to the question or the solution to the problem. But some of the people that rant about this shit (i.e. "death panels") have absolutely no clue how it works.
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