When they called I was confused at first, then remembered and realized it was legit, paid it, end of story. They were utterly professional and courteous about everything.
I pray I see socialised medicine in the US in my lifetime. If Hilary Clinton gets elected, the push for this will be stronger than the thin edge of a wedge President Obama has managed. We need a full single-payer tax-based system.
I pay the ridiculous sum of $700 US dollars a month for my family's health insurance. If we raise taxes by 10% for every American, we could have awesome health care. I'd gladly take the 10% tax over $8400 a year I pay now. Sick, capitalist theft. I feel I've been politely robbed every pay period.
http://www.aha.org/research/rc/stat-studies/fast-facts.shtml
One man's profit is another man's stash for bonuses and building a new wing of the hospital.
Where do you find money if your top doctor wants a raise or threatens to leave for a competitor?
It's the insurance system that is the problem, since I have insurance the hospitals won't give me a dime off my bill, and my costs are heavily inflated because those of us WITH insurance are subsidizing those without.
Now, I'm a software engineer, I make a comfortable income and have a high deductible healthplan and a health savings account, I know I will be able to afford health expenses should they come up, at worst I can make payment arrangements because my annual out-of-pocket max is $5K/10K (individual/family).
But many families in my area are just scraping by on barely above minimum wage, and planning for health issues is not high on their priority list. If something happens to them, the $5K debt can be devastating, and it would take them YEARS to pay off what I can in months.
Ultimately, the simplest solution to the resource pooling problem is to eliminate the insurance industry and go single-payer, then EVERYONE pays with their taxes. However, many insurance companies are for-profit and they'll keep fighting against single-payer until they go out of business.
An injured person has no capitalistic value. They are injured, and can either work limitedly or not at all. Therefore, they are worth little to nothing.
Why would a capitalistic government like ours care about someone who will be a drain on the "system"? I's better to send them in the insurance mill or die in the ER.
yay usa.
I pray you never experience a major medical issue whereby you are "useless" to society.
A 10% rise in taxes? That's a heck of a lot of money. The majority of the rich won't buy into it, they'll fight it tooth and nail.
In my opinion, I think it depends on how well appeals for/against a single-payer system resonate with the middle class. Do they generally feel that they will be subsidized, or be subsidizing?
Heck, even some poor people (who would be net winners) won't even support it on principle.
But now they pay insurance anyway, aren't they?. With a single-payer system, their contribution would actually probably fall.
Single payer would have to come in at about a 5-7 percent tax increase for it to be even remotely palatable to me, and that's as someone who's all for it and think it's morally bankrupt that we don't have it.
http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
Actually, even without additional tax, if US government dropped Medicare, Medicaid and other state sponsored insurance systems in favor of universal coverage, it would have enough money to have world-class healthcare system without any additional taxes -- the US government _already_ spends as much on health care per capita as Germany, or France, and 30% more than UK.
The fact of the matter is: If a goal involves raising taxes on the rich (or corporations) in the US, it will be pretty difficult to achieve.
It is true that socialized medicine puts an end to the financial hardship imposed on individuals, but it also brings other problems into the picture, namely rationed healthcare. I've experienced it myself. That's why you have so many Canadians coming to the US when they get really sick.
Hardly any Canadians come to the US for medical care, it's a silly rumor that has no grounding in reality. The US has one of the most expensive health care systems in the world for people without insurance, but we're supposed to believe that all these Canadians are rushing over the border with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for marginally better care?
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/3/19.full
"Results from these sources do not support the widespread perception that Canadian residents seek care extensively in the United States. Indeed, the numbers found are so small as to be barely detectable relative to the use of care by Canadians at home."
At any rate, rationing of healthcare is a reality in Canada. A few years back the Supreme Court of Canada stated that the ban on private health insurance violated Canadians' right to security as the waiting times for the public system were so high.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaoulli_v._Quebec_(Attorney_Ge...
They also polled Canadians directly to approach the question from both sides.
> Several sources of evidence from Canada reinforce the notion that Canadians seeking care in the United States were relatively rare during the study period. Only 90 of 18,000 respondents to the 1996 Canadian NPHS indicated that they had received health care in the United States during the previous twelve months, and only twenty indicated that they had gone to the United States expressly for the purpose of getting that care.
So it's that they want to go to the pre-eminent institutions in the world, not "American healthcare (as a whole) is better than Canadian" - -your- inference is weak.
If that is the determining factor, I can guarantee that if those same Canadians had needed a heart transplant in the 80s, they would have flown to Sydney to go to St Vincent's and be operated on by Dr Victor Chang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Chang). I think your causality is broken.
It's just rationed in an inhumane, stupid way in the U.S.
No one from the industrialized world comes "to the U.S." because of a severe illness. Rather, people come to specific doctors for new procedures, or to have the one surgeon in the world who's done Risky Procedure X a hundred times instead of four. If that doctor's in Paris, they go to France. If he's at Mount Sinai, they go to New York. If he's at Hopkins, they go to Baltimore. But no one from the industrialized world comes to the US itself for its not-that-great-overall healthcare system, and no one has for over 30 years.
I presume that in your socialist medical system doctors, nurses, drug chemists, medical feathers and so forth would still get paid, right? Guess what? That's profit.
There's plenty wrong with our health care system. Much of it is due to the insurance idea. Much of it is regulatory. Much of it is structural. Single payer wouldn't really address any of that (not even the insurance bit: it'd be insurance writ large). What we need is for everyone to pay for what he receives, with charity/welfare for the indigent. It works for food; it works for medicine.
Have for-profit clinics for stupid things like breast implants and other things that insurance should never be paying for -- like optional stuff.
As a large debt collector, they were easy to find and sue if one of the agents did anything wrong.
The horror stories you hear about collectors are often these fly by night places with 100 people crammed in a strip mall location. They use illegal tactics and hope to collect enough money before being shut down and forced to sell off the rest of the portfolio.