You're absolutely right. I screwed up. I read the table wrong. Yes, I know there is a huge differences in what Medicare pays and what is billed. I quoted the figures billed by hospitals and not what insurance pays because what the hospital bills is what they will try to collect from you if you don't have insurance.Flop I am disappointed. According to your own chart the $536,000 you claim is the cost of average Medicare visit is rather the number of discharges in Florida. But if you thought about it instead of reflexively going back to talking points you would realize f just 1,000,000 people used Medicare in Florida the bill,would be 536,000,000,000. You have no figures, you just use anecdotals. You know people who have never smoked die of lung cancer, meaning you can always find one example to support your case. You got insurance. I got insurance, but I run into people everyday who paid nothing and get plenty of healthcare. Help is out there and as they like to say ignorance is no excuse for not having health care. By far, the largest group without health care are young healthy people. And Flop you assume people don’t care about other people and try to help them through direct donations or from go fund me sites, as I have done. I myself have postponed operations because of insurance problems. It happens.My son in law spent 16 days in a hospital and died. The bill was $476,000. He had healthcare coverage which paid all but $7,000. My wife was in hospital last year 3 times for short stays, 3 to 7 days. The total for year was $127,000. The average Medicare hospital billing upon discharge in the state of Florida in 2011 was $536,000 and that was in 2011. It is certainly higher today.I am awaiting the list of people who have died because they lacked health care coverage. I suppose you could twist people waiting for an organ donor and say they died because of lack of coverage, or maybe claim dead drug addicts died because of lack of coverage. Your own example of a 670,000 bill disproves your assertion.
A list of people that died because of lack of coverage?? You apparently know nothing about the problem. People have breaks in coverage. For example depending on the state, you can wait up to 9 weeks to get Medicaid coverage. If you have to buy insurance through the exchanges you may have to wait up 10 months because they don't open till Nov of each year. Even when you sign up for coverage there is usually a minimum of 30 days before coverage begins. When you get a diagnosis of cancer or a serious heart problem, you can't wait weeks and months for coverage. Even worse, tests needed for diagnosis can cost thousands of dollars and people without coverage often delay until they have the new job and healthcare coverage, or the exchange opens, or they qualify for Medicaid and then they find out they waited too long.
A new problem has popped up since Trump became president. He ordered the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to come up with new regulations on Obamacare that would lower premiums. Now, many policies are being sold that have yearly maximums as low as $250,000 plus insurance companies are being allowed to sell policies without coverage for expensive treatments of many serious problems. In effect, these policies are offering coverage at lower premiums that pay some routine healthcare costs but provide less when you really need it which is crazy. We buy health insurance to pay for healthcare cost we could never afford not low cost routine care.
Average Hospital Cost By State
And the way you play fast and loose with these numbers, if you really have had any contact with Medicare you should know better. I have BCBS supplemental insurance. They send me a monthly spreadsheet of any monthly bills. Recently I had a procedure where the anesthesiologist charged $2400 for her work. You know what Medicare paid? One tenth of that amount and the doctor accepted that. This happens all the time, so you can throw all,these big numbers around but they have no basis to Medicare reality.
Flop the reason I am disappointed in you is that you usually are more,substantial than this. You are repeating fiction and myth. Same as the guy who said republicans are killing women(interesting, if women are being killed by these terrible republicans wouldn’t men also be dying too? Oh I forgot, men are not important to the democratic narrative of special interest groups). Could healthcare be better, of course, couldn’t everything be better? Your insinuation that there is a sick silent majority out there in a state of perpetual illness because they don’t have health insurance is a fraud, just like most all democratic claims. Neither facts nor anecdotes support such propaganda for the vast majority of Americans.
My son in laws bill of $476,000 was covered by his insurance except for $7,000 and the hospital wrote it off because he died and there was no estate otherwise they would have tried to collect it. A friend told me that when the hospitals sells your bill to a collection agency they will typically get about 5% to 10%. So it makes sense that the hospital might lower the bill down to this amount if payment is in cash. However, asking people who are uninsured to pay a reasonable amount of their bill will probably be well beyond their means.
I really believe most people have no idea just how expensive a hospital can be without insurance and dealing with bill collectors and bankruptcy has it's own unique set of problem.