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The $23,000 bug bite

Ryokan said:
Countries going into debt seems to have nothing to do with UHC. The USA doesn't have UHC, and is in massive debt. The Scandinavian countries, among the strongest welfare states in the world, are doing just fine.
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As is Australia, which also has a NHS.
 
dirtywick said:
If you can afford a mortgage you can afford payments on $25,000 on a payment plan with the hospital, you don't even need a loan and you wouldn't be paying interest on it either.

You'd lose some disposable income, but it wouldn't ruin you. That's all I'm saying.
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Be careful with those payments though. My brother was paying on a $50K bill and made the mistake of paying double one month, then skipping the next. They considered that a termination of the agreement and demanded immediate payment of the remainder. No amount of explanation could convince them otherwise. He had to borrow the money from family.
 
dirtywick said:
If you can afford a mortgage you can afford payments on $25,000 on a payment plan with the hospital, you don't even need a loan and you wouldn't be paying interest on it either.

You'd lose some disposable income, but it wouldn't ruin you. That's all I'm saying.
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Wait, what? "disposable income"? After getting the two associate degrees that have sustained me low these many 30 some odd years. My pay as a drafter (back in the late 80's) was five dollars an hour. As happenstance has it my "disposable income" at that time was only five dollars a week, just an hours worth of work (good thing drinks were only a buck back then). So you might want to dispose of the "disposable income" angle. As some now ain't even got that and pay bills by what credit they can get (much like most world governments). I had and had no care of medical insurance back then. A $23,000 incident (medical or otherwise, even adjusted to those times) would have bankrupted me. Oh, I'm sorry "bankruptcy isn't necessarily a bad thing." perhaps I should have tried that, have you?
 
WildCat said:
I disagree, even a UHC system has to have detailed information about treatment etc if they are to prevent fraud, which already costs Medicare IIRC $60-80 billion/year.
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But what kind of fraud is there to prevent? If everyone is entitled to care free at the point of service, there are only clinical decisions to be made; the doctor decides whether treatment is necessary, and there's no question about whether the patient is eligible because the only possible answer is "yes".

Dave
 
dirtywick said:
If you can afford a mortgage you can afford payments on $25,000 on a payment plan with the hospital, you don't even need a loan and you wouldn't be paying interest on it either.

You'd lose some disposable income, but it wouldn't ruin you. That's all I'm saying.
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And how many Americans, despite having jobs, can't afford a mortgage and have little or no disposable income?

Seriously, do you live in a middle class bubble?
 
WildCat said:
I disagree, even a UHC system has to have detailed information about treatment etc if they are to prevent fraud, which already costs Medicare IIRC $60-80 billion/year. They'll need evidence the treatment is necessary, that it was actually performed, etc etc.
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People defraud Medicare to get out of paying for treatment themselves. Remove the need to pay and you remove the need to defraud Medicare.
 
dirtywick said:
$25,000 in and of itself isn't bankruptcy. I mean, if you want to create a cirumstance where it is, and then ignore that circumstance, then sure it's terrible, but at that point bankruptcy isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Again with the total lack of any ability to empathise.

US$25K is not enough to bankrupt you.
 
dirtywick said:
If you can afford a mortgage you can afford payments on $25,000 on a payment plan with the hospital, you don't even need a loan and you wouldn't be paying interest on it either.

You'd lose some disposable income, but it wouldn't ruin you. That's all I'm saying.
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Except that paying a mortguage isn't from disposable income, if I was paying one it'd be in lieu of the rent I currently pay. If I had to pay that to a hospital instead, I wouldn't have a house to live in. You can't just stop paying your rent/mortguage because the hospital demands their money.
 
Dave Rogers said:
But what kind of fraud is there to prevent?
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False billings:
The operator of a Queens medical practice specializing in radiological exams was arrested by FBI and Secret Service agents early Thursday on charges of filing more than $30 million in false Medicare and Medicaid billings, prosecutors tell NBC 4 New York.
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More false billings:
A federal jury in Central Islip today convicted the owner of a Long Island medical supply company of a $10.7 million Medicare fraud and wrongful disclosure of private patient information.
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Etc.:
Also on the most-wanted list is Ekaterina Shlykova, who is accused of running a Los Angeles jewelry store that was used to launder $53 million in payments from Medicare for medical supplies. Many were ordered for dead people and for others who did not seek the supplies, authorities say.
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Etc.:
BATON ROUGE, LA—United States Attorney Donald J. Cazayoux, Jr. announced today that a Federal Jury on Tuesday, August 21, 2012, convicted Sandra Parkman Thompson, 57, of New Orleans, Louisiana, of health care fraud and conspiracy to pay and receive illegal remunerations.
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Nothing about UHC protects against that.
 
wollery said:
People defraud Medicare to get out of paying for treatment themselves. Remove the need to pay and you remove the need to defraud Medicare.
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See post #110. Nothing about any of those cases is about obtaining treatment.
 
WildCat said:
False billings:

[...]

Nothing about UHC protects against that.
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No, I suppose that's mainly a function of having different profit-making organisations supplying services to one another. Now, if you had a not-for-profit national health service...

But even so, the necessity to determine eligibility for services, and to detect fraudulent requests for services, is a cost that simply vanishes in a truly universal system. So how much of that $60-80 billion is spent checking eligibility, and how much on investigating and preventing fraudulent billings?

Dave
 
If we had UHC, what I'd recommend is to have people include a list of all their medical expenses as part of filing their taxes.
Doctors, hospitals, etc. can send you a UHC-3 form (or whatever) that you can just include at the end of the year to fulfill your requirement.
That creates a built-in double-check so that any expense that is claimed by a medical practice but not included on a patient's forms that year is flagged for investigation.
 
WildCat said:
False billings:


More false billings:


Etc.:


Etc.:


Nothing about UHC protects against that.
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I didn't suggest the point of UHC is to prevent fraud. There's fraud in the current system too, yet we don't scrap it because of that. If you insist on a perfect system without possibility of abuse, you will have no system at all. I will reiterate, though, that a UHC will make fraud easier to catch than in the current system. Coordination of benefits can hide a multitude of sins, and under UHC you won't have multiple payors.
 
WildCat said:
False billings:


More false billings:


Etc.:


Etc.:


Nothing about UHC protects against that.
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Except that a lot of these cases wouldn't exist under UHC because such operators wouldn't be able to bill the state in the way they can under Medicare.

You seem to be operating under the false assumption that UHC systems work the same way Medicare and Medicaid. They don't.

Medicare and Medicaid are essentially government funded insurance, and pay out in the same way. UHC operates in a different way, and although fraud is possible, fraud of the type and scale shown in those stories is next to impossible under a proper UHC system.
 
It's not the profit, it's the percentage of the service provided which would actually be needed in a better-designed system. For example, the gold-plated cutlery on the private jet isn't profit. Neither are the salaries of the gazillion accounts clerks needed to deal with the paperwork tracking entitlement and payments. All of it is needless overhead though.

Rolfe.
 
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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"better dead than Red." Will you be selling tickets - because I'm in for front row seats.
We'd be much better off if people like you actually lived up to your threats because the rest of your post is just so idiotic that there is no reasonable response to it.

Not one person with this retarded stance has ever been able to explain in anything resempling REALITY why having some form of UHC is communist. Why is spending on roads, police, fire, parks not communist? We've been doing that for a 100 years and funny how none of us are walking around cowtowing to Mr. Lenin.
 
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