See my reply to dan7000 immediately above. What hospital in your community would you want to go to if you thought you were having a heart attack tonight? Let’s check out their discount policy.
Irrelevant to what I posted. I said people have to make a tradeoff between going to the ER and deciding if they can pay for it. You said “But no, EMTALA!!!” I said EMTALA does not have anything to do with whether you pay, which is 100% true. I can find the law for you and you can show me where it says that the care is free. You posted a bunch of irrelevant stuff about how some hospitals provide charity care for some patients who can read and interpret at least 5 pages of legal terminology and then PROVE that they have incomes within the level. Generally this comes AFTER the patient has been already billed and threatened, and often only if the patient knows to ask for it. But regardless, it’s irrelevant to patients who do not qualify or cannot prove they qualify or don’t read english etc etc etc. And it is irrelevant to my point, which is that EMTALA does not mean you get free care.
Also, if your only response to the need for healthcare reform in the US is “but sometimes you can get charity!” then you might as well not respond.
And finally, I personally have been billed many times by ERs and I did not get “the same discount commercial insurers get.” If everyone gets the discount, then why is it called a discount?? Are you seriously contending that nobody ever gets billed the non-discounted rate? Because I have tens of thousands of dollars of ER bills that beg to differ.
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Woo, (possibly) only having to pay 50% of thousands of dollars for emergency care. Awesome.
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And next time you wake up at 3 am, be sure to research the hospital’s discount policy before you go to the ER! And maybe get a lawyer to interpret it for you, since, as lolipop explains, it is too long and complicated to post or explain in full very easily. (If you are considering calling an ambulance, make sure to check their policy too – they probably don’t have one but check anyway – and then also check every hospital in the area because you don’t know which one the ambulance is affiliated with). And once you have done that, pull out last years’ tax returns to make sure you qualify. Not sure if you qualify? Better stay home and die. Welcome to the USA!
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You do realize that people above that threshold can still get stuck with bills that can plunge them into poverty. Millions of Americans are living pay check to pay check, literally a disaster away from a downward spiral.
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Well, last time I had severe chest pains, I went to the Civic campus of the Ottawa Hospital. That got blood tests, monitoring and an EKG, and spawned a treadmill test, and a barium swallow and X-ray, none of which turned up anything.
As it happened, much later, when they did a technetium bone scan to check me for metastasis, they evidently saw something peculiar with one of my ribs, which may account for what I was going through earlier.
As it is, this last summer I’ve been through a consultation with a urologist/surgical oncologist; a trans-rectal ultrasound biopsy (not fun unless you’re into rough trade - I’m not); several consultations with my radiation oncologist; CT scan with iodine tracer and the aforementioned bone scan to check for metastasis (none, thank G-d); another CT to set up alignment for radiation therapy (I got some natty tats: a dot on my groin and on each hip); hormone therapy (so far 2 injections of Zoladex, one every 3 months - there will be 6 more, with a nominal cost of about 3,000 CAD a pop); 38 sessions of RT, about 10 minutes each, 5 days a week; and catheterisation (my tumour blocked my urethra - it’s prostate cancer we’re talking about here), which has led to a couple of ER visits when the catheter blocked (you do not fuck around when that happens - it is dangerous as Hell), which led to catheter replacements. I will need to set up an appointment with my urologist to figure out where we’re going with the catheter - the radiation people had to start it, but they don’t feel competent to maintain it (which is understandable).
This hasn’t cost me more than bus fare and few paramedic taxi rides (3 x 40 CAD ambulance fees) over the years.
So… let’s put this into perspective. You undoubtedly have a plan, probably a pretty good one, being in the industry and all. What sort of coverage would your own plan afford you for the above schedule of treatments?
Edit: I left out all the blood tests and urine tests, roughly 6 (one for the chest pains) and 4 respectively. I had to pay 35 CAD for the initial PSA test, but, because I have cancer, PSA tests no longer cost me a thing - that’s a bit of a Catch-22 for a screening test.
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Sorry, but you’re wrong. The policy I had was no longer offered because it did not comply with the ACA. It’s nice that you were able to get coverage. I’m glad it seems to have worked out for you, but not so much for me.
Large majority? I believe the number was 16%. Which dropped to… 10.5%? So we blew up the system for a whopping 6% drop. This has been one of my (several) beefs with the ACA. It used a bunker buster when it could have gotten the same results with a grenade.
And as for Medicare, I’m not sure that it’s something we want foisted on everyone. Heck, my parents moved from a small town to a retirement facility in a larger city in part because of the larger medical community there, only to find out… no one was taking new medicare patients.
That was absolutely not how it was sold. If I had a nickel for every time someone said “bend the cost curve” in selling the ACA, I would, well, have a lot of nickels.
I believe that until the AMA’s influence on preventing an increase in the supply of doctors (it’s criminal that we require foreign trained doctors to retrain from scratch) is curtailed, it will be difficult if not impossible to see improvement. In addition, quite a bit of what people are requiring a doctor for could easily and safely be handled by nurses, which can also help with cost.
My income exceeds $20000 and I am insured, but the deductible / out-of-pocket max leaves enough room for me / my family to be ruined. Most of my income is spent supporting my family who have considerable debt from the 2008 crash, and the rest on my own medical needs. I have no savings to absorb sudden expenses, and a $1000 bill would immediately put me and my family in a dire position.
I could probably pull it off once a year with significant sacrifice, but making the decision to pull the trigger when I have maybe 5 minutes to decide is extremely difficult and dangerous, and worst of all entirely unnecessary.
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Yes. I’m sorry about your medical issues, and I hope you have the best possible outcome, but I came here to say that your experience matches that of a number of friends and relatives in Ontario who have had treatment for major medical problems over the years. Not one of them went bankrupt or was even severely burdened financially.
I’m proud that my taxes make that possible, and I sleep better at night knowing that my own (inevitable) future care won’t ruin me. I can’t believe that most Americans wouldn’t feel the same under a similar system.
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I honestly have never heard that phrase. But I wasn’t paying that much attention to how it was pitched. I do remember people talking about other causes of high cost that wouldn’t be addressed; tort reform, cost of prescriptions, supply of doctors, administration costs. Maybe they could have pitched it as, “more people are covered so economies of scale”…i guess that’s the cost curve
Well, really, the only one that turned out to be serious was the cancer. As it turns out, I have a young man’s circulatory system. It’s just that, at a certain age, you don’t fuck around with chest pains because things can change rather rapidly, and I am a man of a certain age.
Even the cancer isn’t slowing me down significantly. I’ll be going for a followup in December, and we’ll see how things are going. My PSA levels are down significantly, which is a positive sign.
It’s just that I am rather curious how much a fairly common set of treatments for a fairly common problem would set back someone with (presumably) a good insurance plan. I’m willing to bet it is a lot more than I have had to spend.
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The ACA imposes a penalty if you don’t purchase health insurance (from an “Insurance Company”). And despite Obama’s assurance that we could “keep the coverage that we had”, I could not keep the nice affordable plan that I had. It was no longer offered because it didn’t meet ACA standards.
I’m really glad the ACA worked out well for you, but for me, not so much.
I shattered my fingernail making something on the tablesaw at home in the USA. Went to the ER and the bill was over $3000.
Took a nasty fall while fishing a mountain stream in Japan. Went to the ER and got a bunch of stitches, as well as xrays and a full exam. The bill was under $300.
I have Health Insurance in the USA, but have no health insurance in Japan.
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Which means you were getting fleeced. You had a policy that cost you money but would have put you in the poor house if any real medical issue had occurred. Thanks, Obama!
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You just proved my point! If you had such great affordable insurance, why didn’t it cover your medical costs?
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That was my ACA policy. Great affordable insurance? Actually, more expensive, higher deductible, and less coverage.
By definition it couldn’t have been less coverage than what you had before.
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