90% of americans have health insurance… so all this shows is 10% pay more than the other 90%.
And an uninsured person is more expensive to serve. You need to track down payment and they are less likely to pay.
And an uninsured person is more expensive to serve. You need to track down payment and they are less likely to pay.
And what percent of all claims are summarily denied forcing the person to fight the insurance company for months or years before they actually pay for anything?
Many people would gladly pay the lower price to get past the bullshit, but instead they are set up to die.
He says with insurance one of the problems is that the insurance company will sometimes pay out less than the cost of the service, and there's nothing they (the hospital) can do about it.
He says they actually have a slightly better rate of payment for services for non-insured patients.
Also he said there's a serious problem with people not paying their share of the bill, when the deductible has not yet been met.
They will be old, barely able to walk, and their entire life was consumed by paying for healthcare, and they wont even be left with memories of good times.
1) they're poor and have no money
2) medical debts are easier to ignore than other debts that these people also have (because they're poor)
3) they're going to die much sooner than insured people
...and the hospital knows this. So the hospital charges some large multiple of what they charge insured patients so that, when they ultimately sell the debt to the debt collectors at a deep discount, they come out approximately even. If somebody is somehow enough of a sucker to pay the sticker amount, it's just a nice surprise. The other victims of this debt will either just die and never pay, negotiate with the hospital to pay much less, or negotiate with the debt collector for much less.
Would this all be simpler and better if the prices were the same for insured and uninsured people? Yes.
I had a kidney stone several years ago. I suspected, but didn't know, and the pain was crippling (vomiting, crying in the fetal position).
I went to the ER. CT. They loaded me up with pain killers and moved me by ambulance to another hospital 15 minutes away because they had no urologist available. They took me to theater, found some infection, abandoned plans, IV antibiotics, discharged me the next morning, to return 2 weeks later for lithotripsy or otherwise.
So I came in with a kidney stone, left with a kidney stone (and stent, and pain management).
My bill for this 12 hour process was between $60-70K.
"They're poor" doesn't cut it.
This is a very common thing. And while my presentation was less common, it's still not unusual.
You're not poor if you can't afford a $70,000 unexpected bill for an ER admission, a CT, an abandoned surgical procedure and a stent and an overnight bed on a ward.
> 2) medical debts are easier to ignore than other debts that these people also have (because they're poor)
"ignore" is doing some heavy lifting. There's an element of that, sure, but remember: these had to be legislated to not affect your credit score because they're almost always events that were not poor judgment on your part, but unplanned (they're not being generated from elective or cosmetic events). And people were being penalized for having the unmitigated gall of not having, to use my example, $70K laying around, "just in case" they got sick. And those penalties have real impacts. You still need a roof over your head if you're sick, but good luck finding a rental, let alone a mortgage, with that on your credit report.
For the most part, to be uninsured in the US is to be impoverished.
I was a paramedic for 14 years, and saw more than anyone should see with people having to use the emergency system for issues that could and would have been taken care of far easier, with far less discomfort, risk, and cost, if they had access to some manner of healthcare safety net.