Tuesday, January 24, 2017

All of this hysteria about healthcare is phony.

I think my head is going to spin right off. I grew up poor and uninsured. This whole heal care thing is not actually rocket science.

So, the other day I was talking to my commie girlfriend. I'm not being mean. I'm being accurate.(Well, somewhat reformed now). But lived on a commune and the whole bit. She is a single mother with a kid. And the kid has a bunch of health problems. Allergic to air kinda kid. So she was telling me something about that. Which I thought was a good opportunity to ask her if she was taking the penalty on Obamacare. She's mentioned a while back she was going to which made me laugh and be resentful all at once. I told you - she lived on a commune! Anyway.

She said she was indeed taking the penalty. I think she said it was 700 dollars a year for her. She then went on to say she could just walk into a clinic and it's only like 40 bucks. And sometimes they give you drugs for free. Which is exactly the way it was when I was growing up. Now my girlfriend isn't poor. She is a single mother, but she's doing okay.  But do you know how many visits you need to have to rack up 700 bucks a year? She might have been a commie, but she's at least figured out math.

I have insurance, yet I don't spend what I pay into health care. The whole thing is a racket and the sooner people just start paying more in cash. The better off we will all be. The price of everything will come right down.

2 comments:

  1. What American insurance buys you is the ability to pay something that might resemble a "market rate" in a highly distorted market ...

    My recent hospitalisation in America was charged at a rate of almost 70k USD, but after the hospital, "health care providers" (what they call doctors and nurses now, I suppose), insurers, and everyone else involved agreed to a few rounds of price reductions, the total cost was 11k USD.

    Which I paid 4k USD for and the insurance paid the rest.

    Essentially what you're really paying for is to have a bigger bully against some of the rest of the organised mob of American health care, all so you won't get bent over so badly that you're looking at your own backside.

    And then there's the prescriptions -- retail for one of mine for ninety days would be nearly 2k USD without insurance, and that's with a "long-term supply" arrangement. I used to pay £8.85 for prescriptions, and I didn't need a ninety day supply because the prices were reasonable. I can buy this same prescription without insurance as a ninety day supply in Canada for roughly 400 CAD, but as I understand things it's illegal for me personally to import it into the United States.

    My health cover, which is pretty decent as far as American insurance goes yet has some shocking gaps and omissions, costs roughly 12k USD per year in premiums and co-payments alone.

    The only reason the Canadians and Europeans would be laughing is that they figured out how to get their governments to work for them in terms of bullying the pharma companies instead of the other way around. On the services side, however, you really are better off getting on a plane or a train to where services work better.

    If it ever gets so bad that I just decide to leave again for a while, I'll probably go to the Philippines where I can simply stroll into most pharmacies to get what I need without a doctor's prescription or even a doctor's note.

    Naturally, as a US citizen and resident, I'd be paying the penalty then too ...

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  2. Well, I don't disagree with that. Which is why I try to push people to pay cash. Like your surgery they knock a ton off the price. And cash gets all the bullies out of the way.

    I needed a surgery to help with my back pain about 10 years ago. My insurance company drug their feet, and basically didn't want to pay for it. And when they finally agreed to it they were going to give me a stay in the hospital and put a pain pump in me.

    After a while I got fed up and decided to pay for it myself. It was really affecting my life in a substantial way. The doctor I hired said I didn't need a hospital stay, and really I was fine with a few vikes instead of a pain pump in the end. I was pretty terrified going into surgery with no insurance backup, but it turned out that the surgeon I chose actually had surgery insurance that I paid for at the time incase I had complications.

    Now I don't know what. a hospital stay costs, But it was unnecessary. It probably would have doubled my bill. All a long the way they cut the price because I was paying in cash. Even at the end my bill wound up being a couple thousand dollars more than what I was quoted. And I called them up and told them so, and told them they might as well send me to collections right away because there were no complications. They completely wrote the rest off.

    If I didn't have such a hard time sleeping I might have just taken what the insurance doctor wanted, but I really didn't want to stay in a hospital. With all the beeping and people I would have never gotten any sleep. So I was glad I chose a different surgeon and found out a lot about how doctors kinda jack up the price if you have insurance. And why wouldn't they?

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