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The $23,000 bug bite

Ask Daddy if he would have chosen bankruptcy to have his kid survive?
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Since when is bankruptcy vs death of a child a choice anyone, anywhere should be forced to make? Double for a choice like that in a civilized nation with 'the best healthcare'?
 
LTC8K6 said:
The point is that the child was insured under SCHIP, regardless of the father's employment status.

Children have had universal insurance in the US for decades, as long as you enroll them.

Obamacare does not change this as far as I know. It's funded by Obamacare through 2015.

So, had the child been bitten in 2015, he'd have been covered exactly the same way, as far as I can tell. By the State program.
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Replace the child by an adult being bitten by a bug if you prefer. The reasonning would be the same without SCHIP.
 
Yeah, that's a great idea. Let's just turn over a huge part of our economy to government health-care. No, sorry. I can think of nothing more apropos than the phrase "better dead than Red."
 
LTC8K6 said:
The point is that the child was insured under SCHIP, regardless of the father's employment status.

Children have had universal insurance in the US for decades, as long as you enroll them.

Obamacare does not change this as far as I know. It's funded by Obamacare through 2015.

So, had the child been bitten in 2015, he'd have been covered exactly the same way, as far as I can tell. By the State program.
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Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but reading the Wikipedia article on SCHIP it appears the program was designed to cover children in low-income families.

Wikipedia said:
The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid ... During the administration of George W. Bush, two attempts to expand funding for the program failed when President Bush vetoed them. Mr. Bush argued that such efforts were steps toward federalization of health care, and would "steer the program away from its core purpose of providing insurance for poor children and toward covering children from middle-class families."
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As Wildcat pointed out, if the father is managing COBRA payments he most likely does not qualify for SCHIP.

I also highlighted the word "decades," because SCHIP has been around since 1997. So I guess 1½ decades is "decades," but certainly not the forty or fifty years that I see when I see a comment like "X has been around for decades."
 
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Cain said:
Yeah, that's a great idea. Let's just turn over a huge part of our economy to government health-care. No, sorry. I can think of nothing more apropos than the phrase "better dead than Red."
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Ah, why bother with facts when you can simply ignore them with a little bit of jingoism?

A huge part, eh? Like the 8% that your federal government already spends to insure a subset of the population, while Canada and the U.K. also spend 8% to cover everybody?

Also, a government mandated universal health insurance program does not mean that the government provides the health care, nor does it even mean the government even pays for the health care. Several European countries have universal health care provided almost entirely by private insurers.
 
Blue Mountain said:
Bug bites ten year old boy; total bill is $23,800

Short version: After a bug bite got infected, the kid ended up with MRSA. It was treated, but the bill is $23,800. The blogger's insurance, still covered by COBRA after his company relocated from California to Texas, is paying about 95% of the bill. He's left to pay "less than 6%"; at 5.5% his portion is $1,300. This after footing the entire health insurance bill himself for probably the last year.



In my opinion, the guy was lucky, since he's managed to find the funds to continue his health insurance through COBRA, at least for a while. How many other Americans aren't so lucky?

If this had happened in Canada, I dare say he would be paying zero dollars out-of-pocket for this incident, and he wouldn't have had to pay a huge amount for his health insurance just because his company decided to relocate from Ontario to Alberta. Unfortunately, if the doctor prescribes antibiotics for a few weeks after the boy leaves hospital, he'd likely have to pay for those himself. (I don't know of any provinces that have full prescription coverage. That and dental coverage are sorely lacking from the Canadian system.)
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A few years back the company I was working for terminated its health insurance. It was only me and the president of the company on the insurance and it was cheaper for him just to pay for his own (family) policy. Up to that point I was paying all premiums for myself. Unfortunately since I was not being discharged COBRA was not an option and an individual policy on my own would cost about as much as just paying for the drugs I needed (about $1,500 a month) while not even covering the entire cost of those drugs. I was forced to cut back dosages and increase a more undesirable (side effects) treatment to get by till I was finally able to take a position with the company I was sub-contracting for. Initially the owner (of the subcontracting company) didn’t want to let me go (I was still making money for them even after he cut my insurance from under me) until I told him ‘it’s either them or somewhere else, without insurance I just can’t stay with you’. He relented and signed off on my transition where the new company insurance had no problem with my preexisting condition and I was back on full medication after a brief ‘probation/enrollment wait’ period. I got lucky things could have been much worse, not being hired by the company, not being let go by the sub-con owner. My condition could have deteriorated on the limited dosage making me un-hirable for this type of work. The new insurance could have denied converge for the preexisting condition for a substantial period or indefinitely (failing scheduled health care reforms).

Oh, for any interested (or don’t know from other times I’ve talked about it) my chronic condition is psoriatic arthritis and my job requires me to climb ladders and scaffoldings as well as perform detailed manual work.
 
dirtywick said:
$25,000 isn't bankruptcy.
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??? For our family right now, a $25,000 medical bill might as well be $25 million.

The fact is, $25.00 is too much if you don't have it. And if you're sick, you have much less opportunity to earn it.
 
I think the bankruptcy or death is a bit misleading. The American Healthcare system isn't perfect, it isn't even satisfactory but I have never been turned away from an emergency room, even in nonlife threatening situations, because I couldn't write a check, on the spot. My other experiences with not having insurance include a) never paying what they would charge an insurance company. When I gave birth to my first daughter, the cost of uninsured is almost half of what is charged to the insurance company by both the OB and the hospital. B) As long as you keep an open line of communication with the hospital, they are willing to accept payments of what you can afford to pay, monthly.

Believe me, I am not cheering on the awesomeness of being uninsured. The only time insurance companies are willing to accept me (on private policies) is if it includes a ryder, specifically negating anything relating to my preexisting conditions. I either pay for insurance or my medical necessities because I can't afford both. Nor am I defending the current system. It is as bad as it is on its own merit, without resorting to dishonest representations of the facts. That's just my two cents.
 
Blue Mountain said:
A huge part, eh? Like the 8% that your federal government already spends to insure a subset of the population, while Canada and the U.K. also spend 8% to cover everybody?
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I hope you realize that the American population is not just a muliple of the Canadian population.

I would love to see the Canadian system try to cover all Americans on 8% of US GDP. They'd be in the red so quickly their heads would spin.
 
sgtbaker said:
I think the bankruptcy or death is a bit misleading. The American Healthcare system isn't perfect, it isn't even satisfactory but I have never been turned away from an emergency room, even in nonlife threatening situations, because I couldn't write a check, on the spot.
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Yes, they will stabilize your condition. They will not treat it.

Need chemo for that cancer? Better have insurance or a huge wad of cash. Otherwise you're on your own.
 
AvalonXQ said:
I hope you realize that the American population is not just a muliple of the Canadian population.

I would love to see the Canadian system try to cover all Americans on 8% of US GDP. They'd be in the red so quickly their heads would spin.
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That's because there's no mechanism to contain costs in the US system.
 
dirtywick said:
$25,000 isn't bankruptcy.
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Really? Because I had to declare bankruptcy over a $5000 medical bill some years ago.

If you have no money and no income and the government declares you ineligible for their programs you are screwed.

That was a pretty low time in my life living in someones garage, no job, I had to sell all my furniture for food money, then that medical emergency out of nowhere and the government said they couldn't do anything because I was an otherwise healthy young male with no children. Then I couldn't get an apartment for years afterward despite having a job because of what it did to my credit.
 
The child was covered in any case...whether he had COBRA or not. Whether he was poor or middle class, as far as I can tell.

The bill was $1600, not $25K.
 
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Travis said:
Really? Because I had to declare bankruptcy over a $5000 medical bill some years ago.

If you have no money and no income and the government declares you ineligible for their programs you are screwed.

That was a pretty low time in my life living in someones garage, no job, I had to sell all my furniture for food money, then that medical emergency out of nowhere and the government said they couldn't do anything because I was an otherwise healthy young male with no children. Then I couldn't get an apartment for years afterward despite having a job because of what it did to my credit.
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It was the straw that broke the camel's back then.
 
Yeah, medical emergencies have this nasty habit of occurring when you can least afford them.
 
WildCat said:
Yes, they will stabilize your condition. They will not treat it.

Need chemo for that cancer? Better have insurance or a huge wad of cash. Otherwise you're on your own.
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That's fine, like I said, I wouldn't even call the US healthcare system satisfactory, in terms of meeting the needs of it's citizens. Hell, people with insurance still die because they don't always cover the cost of expensive but life saving treatments. The only point I was making was that there is no need to resort to being dishonest about how the system works.
 
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