The real treat would be using AI to stop regulatory capture so you don't end up in a country where it's okay to be presented with a 195K bill that can be magically lowered if you insist hard enough.
The threads says this was 4 hours of work and they billed for things that weren't even used.
Food for thought:
- this approach produces systemic outcomes that are worse and cost more than other approaches
- there are lots of ways for people to get paid to provide medical care. Medical professionals do not work for free in other countries, and they buy the same equipment and drugs from the same suppliers as Americans do.
- we are allowed to look at how other countries have solved this problem without hitting people with giant medical bills. We are allowed to apply those solutions here.
- the US standard of care is overall not particularly high in the global rankings. We may decide that we don't want to continue providing this standard of care, we may decide we want to be in the top 10 globally.
> Bills were a few thousand here for the cardiologist, another few there for the ER docs, a bit for the radiologist. I helped my sister-in-law negotiate these down but they weren’t back breakers. Then the hospital bill came: $195k. This is a story about that.
I think a public option is the only feasible path forward.
Not once have I had a sleepless night since been diagnosed over a decade ago about insurance, co-pay or how to afford my drugs/medical treatment.
I’m on two prescriptions per month, total cost to me is £114 a year (about 150 bucks).
Folks over in the US are getting hosed, twice the per capita with a worse outcome and it costs you a fortune on top personally.
That healthcare is tied to employment is just the insane cherry on top (I’m aware of the historical reasons why that happened but should have been fixed not long after).
I believe the reason for higher US success rates was that the US used more aggressive treatments that the UK would not, since neither does the NHS pay for them nor do their doctors offer them. It is easy to complain about the US system, but the reason that the per capita cost of health care in the US is high could be because the US will try expensive things that the UK’s NHS never would have attempted (since spending exorbitant amounts on aggressive treatments with low chances of success to attain US success rates would drive the per capita cost of medicine to what could be US levels). The high US pricing of those treatments could be further amplified by attempts to take advantage of ignorance. Amplification to take advantage of ignorance was clearly the case in the article author’s case.
I feel like the opposite viewpoint in favor of the US system is not well represented in online discourse, which could very well be because those who were not served well by the UK’s NHS are dead. There are anecdotes about people coming to the US for treatments that they could not receive in the UK or Europe, which is consistent with that.
That said, I have only looked at data for cancer survival rates and not other illnesses, but the cancer data alone contradicts what you wrote. Perhaps reality is in the middle where the UK system is better for routine issues (i.e. you avoid sticker shock), but the US system is better for anything that falls outside of that (i.e. you have a better chance to live). There is evidence both systems have plenty of room for improvement.
For what it is worth, I take a prescription medication for a non-life threatening condition. I had once called Costco in Canada to find out how much the price is there out of curiosity. They do not sell it. I then discovered that the drug my doctor prescribed is exclusive to the US and is not sold anywhere else in the world. Presumably, nobody else is willing to pay the exorbitant price that is charged for it. Even the generic is expensive. The US system is expensive, but it gives people access to more expensive treatments that simply are not available elsewhere.
That said, I might have an elective operation in the future. It would have been covered by insurance as a necessity when I was young, but my parents never pursued it and the underlying condition’s severity decreased when I became an adult such that it is now elective surgery. I expect to engage in medical tourism to have that done.
A higher survival rate is to be expected when the doctors have a financial incentive to treat benign growths which the patient would have survived anyway. It can indicate overdiagnosis rather than indicating successful treatment.
I notice regular doctors and dentists do this too. They’ll bill my insurance for extras in case they’ll pay and when insurance says no, the doctor doesn’t bill me either.
Everyone is just trying to suck the most money out of everyone else. It sucks if you’re self-pay because you don’t have the weight of a whole company to do that due diligence for you.