Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/20/just-a-normal-businessman.html
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Well I think MFA is a fine idea, and I’m a health insurance salesman too.
Medicare doesn’t cover everything. There are copays and deductibles, there’s no maximum out-of-pocket, and it doesn’t cover ancillary items like vision, dental, and hearing aids. I’ve had people ask me if MFA would put me out of business. Hell no, it would increase demand for my services tenfold.
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As a user of the UK’s National Health Service, I would say I’m quite happy with my health care; certainly happier than I’ll be if we were to fall under the cold, vampiric shadow of American Health Care.
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In California? What state?
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I feel as though the opinions about healthcare in America should be weighted to favor those who have had to pass through the system. Tough to do without seeing the commenter’s bona fides.
You don’t care about someone’s opinion of a movie they haven’t seen, book they haven’t read, album they haven’t listened to, game they haven’t played. You also don’t take the creator’s word as to how good it is.
It would be helpful if someone would collect testimonials from people who have been through it.
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I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who qualified for Medicare who has stated that they’d prefer to be left to the mercy of the free market. It’s one of those programs everyone loves when they actually have it. Even when they claim to be against “socialized medicine.”
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Private health insurance involves too many death panels, too little choice, too much cost, and too few people covered. Private pharmaceutical companies which parasitize publicly-funded research to gouge Americans on essential drugs are prima facie public bads. Same thing for private for-profit and ‘non-profit’ hospitals that mark-up services like ‘gave an ice pack and had the patient sit in the waiting area’ by hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Nationalize the health care system now!
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Cmon, Cory. Certainly you know that these folks are employed by George Soros, who years ago arranged for them to be in their current positions so that they could then pretend to be “ordinary citizens” opposing “socialized medicine.” That way, when they got caught doing just that, the blowback would tar the Real Americans* who are trying so hard to keep government out of their Medicare. That Soros guy plays the long game, which is why it’s so important to remain vigilant for this sort of thing.
*registered trademark of the Republican Party; may not apply to city-dwellers, individuals with superfluous melanin, or critics of the trademark
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It took my ex nearly dying from a massive heart attack (the surgeon gave her less than a 30% chance of recovery) to get her on Medicare.
If she had been left to the free market afterward, she would be dead now. She couldn’t work, so she wouldn’t have been able to earn the money to pay the premiums, much less the co-pays and deductibles.
Before the heart attack, she was working for a little bit more than minimum wage at a job that put a lot of physical stress on her.
Our entire system is fucked. The people that are in a position to fix it are so wealthy they never need to worry about experiencing it, so they can ignore it and it has no direct effect on them. The people they care about are also wealthy, so the same thing applies. Fixing it to help the people that don’t matter to them might dip their wealth a bit, so fucking no. Very insular and systemic. Depressing.
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I’m happy with my healthcare. I enjoy my declining life expectancy lifestyle.
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I guess the industry saw how well Ajit Pai’s methods worked with killing net neutrality and thought “why not!”
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Missing a “not” in this quote… “Jack A. Roy,” a proud son of Massachussetts, and he "[does] understand how this could work.
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Ohio, also licensed in Kentucky. I can refer you, if you’d like.
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Yet another example of the toxic legacy of Edward Bernays’ early 20th century work with the tobacco industry continuing into the 21st.
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Astroturfroots?
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I’m licensed in California, since 85’.
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I’ve been on Medicare for 2 years now plus I have a Plan F. Everything is taken care of, no out of plan bs.
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I experienced the American health care system for the majority of my life (and been treated there for a major, life-threatening illness) and two different European health care systems for more than 20% of my life (including surgeries major enough to require general anaesthesia). In Europe, I have even experienced both public and private insurance coverage; while the private coverage had higher payment limits, I had to pay everything out of pocket and get reimbursed later, so I have an inkling of what it would be like to get health care in Europe without any insurance whatsoever. My mother had the same surgery as me in the US. Her insurance company was billed $8000, of which she had to pay something like $500. I paid €800, all of which was reimbursed by my insurance company.
I’m back on public health insurance and dent it makes in my paycheck is not trivial. Even so, the American health care system is one of the major reasons I’m not even considering returning to the US at the moment. I rather enjoy living in a place where nearly everybody thinks health care is a basic human right.
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I thought I’d never fit in with anyone. Then I found out about the ordinary citizens that think medicare for all is bad for the economy. Talk about a gateway drug!
In the US I experienced the opposite. I broke a finger while moving to a new city and transitioning coverage. It needed surgery, so I got it done under my old policy, after I’d gotten to the new state.
It took them, no shit, two years to figure out there was an issue with the billing and start demanding money, by which time I’d changed jobs and had to change coverage again. As far as they knew I was uninsured for the surgery, and they sent me a total bill for around $6,000.
I talked to the assorted insurance companies to figure out who was responsible for covering it, got that sorted out, and later found they submitted a bill to the insurance company for $30,000, of which I ended up owing… around $6,000. The insurance did me zero net good. It just gave the hospital a chance to double-dip for way more money.
I’m fairly sure that has to be illegal. It sounds very much like a kind of insurance fraud to me, but I had too much else going at the time to follow up, and I just bet I was under a mandatory arbitration clause anyway.
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