19 ms·
Your New Medical Credit Score Could Deny You Care
- nixass 7y agoOne mention of universal healthcare and all McCarthys of the world unite in uninformed shit talk against it.
- exdsq 7y agoI like how they reference this post alongside their Reddit posts but as of now it's just people commenting saying the author has it wrong. Awkward.
- alexpetralia 7y agoTo be fair, isn't that type of criticism exactly the thing an open discussion board is meant to encourage?
- gatherhunterer 7y agoHe’s lying. There is only one such comment and it is laughably obtuse. Influencing opinion without addressing the topic is exactly what Reddit is for.
- exdsq 7y agoI wasn’t lying, I commented when that was the only comment with upvotes and the only comment here was also upvoted. My point was true at that point in time.
- thathndude 7y agoThe score would almost certainly qualify as a credit report that you are guaranteed access to buy the fair credit reporting act. Pretty much, this article gets the facts wrong in the first two sentences.
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoSo, where do we buy our medical credit reports?
- techntoke 7y agoThe dark web
- hedora 7y agoI doubt it. The hospital isn’t extending an offer for credit, so the law probably doesn’t apply. Also, from personal experience, the FCRA reports are useless. The credit reporting agencies report completely different scores to consumers than banks, and give false information about how to increase your real score. In particular, doing things that benefit banks (such as opening more credit cards) increases the consumer visible scores, but not the scores used in many real estate transactions. The entire credit reporting industry should be outlawed. If I owe you money and won’t pay, sue me. If you want to gauge my credit worthiness, look at my income, and check for court decisions against me.
- the_svd_doctor 7y agoFCRA doesn’t only apply to credit but also housing and employment for instance. I din’t know wether it applies to healthcare though.
- tialaramex 7y agoTwo things, having worked for a big Credit Reference Agency although not specifically on consumer credit. 1. The commercial customers can (for a fee of course) arbitrarily customize the metrics they care about. If you're looking for customers for your high APR "accept anyone" card you don't actually want the person with a squeaky clean history who'll never incur interest. But the recommendations do correlate pretty well with getting what most of us would consider better credit. Lower rates, better terms. 2. The CRAs grew naturally out of what happened before this data was available. Experian, for example, is essentially spun out from a mail order catalog company. So what your plan does is just waste everybody's time for a decade or two and then we're back here again but meanwhile the poorest people have no access to credit.
- uoaei 7y agoYou may not like it, but this is what peak private-markets-for-public-goods looks like.
- rayhendricks 7y agoI’m just waiting for experion to get hacked again and all this info to be public.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoThat was my first thought—then I recalled, "no that was Equifax, wasn't it?" Sadly, no. It's been all of them, including Experian. This seems flat-out mad to me. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/experian-hack-t-mobile-credit-checks-personal-information https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/experian-ha...
- slumdev 7y agoWell, the Equifax hack was way bigger. Probably took a little pressure off of the other bureaus when that happened. Periodic reminder that there are more bureaus than just Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and all of them buy and sell your data every day. One of them [3] even sells your salary data to prospective employers so that they can negotiate against you more effectively. 1. https://www.thebalance.com/6-small-credit-reporting-agencies-consumers-should-know-about-4210980 https://www.thebalance.com/6-small-credit-reporting-agencies... 2. https://www.doctorofcredit.com/two-credit-bureaus-you-should-freeze-before-you-apply-for-a-u-s-bank-credit-card/ https://www.doctorofcredit.com/two-credit-bureaus-you-should... 3. https://www.theworknumber.com/ https://www.theworknumber.com/
- 52-6F-62 7y agoHoly shit at number three. As if we didn't have enough reasons to despise Equifax already.
- marriedWpt 7y ago
- hedora 7y agoI’m surprised this doesn’t violate HIPPA or CCPA. Every time you visit the doctor, the hospital tells experian (by querying the experian system) and then experian resells this information for profit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thrawaway55 7y agoYou do understand the awful people who control the government at the moment, right? There are no bumpers now, ISPs now— just ‘cause!— can sell browsing data. You have a crummy leader at the top & just think all about the ghouls & industry monsters who if they’re not running/control an agency get to run ripshit & fulfill their wishlist by other means.
- rootusrootus 7y agoWhile I agree that the current leadership is probably the worst we've had in this regard (at least in recent memory), there's no way this all just started in 2017.
- prostheticvamp 7y agoHIPAA does not preclude hospitals from sharing data with business partners as needed to conduct their business affairs, assuming those partners likewise comply .
- inetknght 7y ago> sharing data with business partners as needed "As needed" is a definition that most patients would disagree with
- gen220 7y agoIANAL. It is not a HIPPA violation if Experian has signed a BAA with the hospital. It's on the hospital to perform the due diligence checks, to verify that Experian's capable of upholding the terms of the BAA. This article talks about how Experian have SOC-2 issues, which is a cause for concern, but smaller hospitals with tighter budgets could be inclined to look past it. In general, it's important to understand that HIPPA doesn't prevent data from being shared, it gives it a legal framework to be shared within. When things go bad, the HIPPA-associated paperwork provides a roadmap for assigning liability. Liability does get assigned, and companies (providers, insurers, network providers) are held responsible, despite the popular imagination: https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago"Private hospitals are now consulting a secret medical credit score from Experian before you even see a doctor. As a patient you do not have access to this score, nor can you see how it is generated. All you know is that you may be denied care, or receive different care, because of it." Could we classify 'not being able to afford, either time wise, emotional labor wise, or money wise, to deal with the messed up medical billing system' as a pre-existing condition?
- aldoushuxley001 7y agoWell that's terrifying
- IHLayman 7y agoIt’s not just Experian... TransUnion has it too, with the same name as a matter of fact. Although it looks to be a report and not a score just yet, unless I didn’t read it correctly: https://www.transunion.com/product/patient-financial-clearance https://www.transunion.com/product/patient-financial-clearan...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Analemma_ 7y agoThe one bright spot to this is that, since it's a ratchet that can only go in one direction and find more reasons to deny people as it gets more data, privatized health care will eventually be its own undoing when enough people are frozen out of coverage that they can form a voting bloc and give this system the bullet to the head it deserves.
- magduf 7y agoConsidering how much of the population keeps voting for this system, I don't see that happening for decades at the least.
- marklacey 7y ago> The Financial Clearance system combines medical records along with the financial records Experian already has on you to calculate the score. How is this not a complete violation of HIPAA? Are they working around it by having very general HIPAA release forms?
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe law explicitly permits sharing with other entities for billing purposes. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/268/does-the-hipaa-privacy-rule-prevent-health-care-providers-from-using-debt-collection-agencies/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/268/does-the... > The Privacy Rule permits covered entities to continue to use the services of debt collection agencies. Debt collection is recognized as a payment activity within the “payment” definition. See the definition of “payment” at 45 CFR 164.501. Through a business associate arrangement, the covered entity may engage a debt collection agency to perform this function on its behalf. Disclosures to collection agencies are governed by other provisions of the Privacy Rule, such as the business associate and minimum necessary requirements.
- filereaper 7y agoAs a Californian resident, how does stuff like this not violate CCPA? Brokers reselling my health info is far more critical to me than my buying habits. Is there a "do not sell my health info" checkbox?
- jhart99 7y agoAccording to Experian, it looks like they claim they do not collect medical or health information on California Consumers. https://www.experian.com/privacy/ccpa-privacy-policy.html https://www.experian.com/privacy/ccpa-privacy-policy.html I would love to send them a request to see if that is in fact true.
- FireBeyond 7y ago> Is there a "do not sell my health info" checkbox? Yeah, except, sadly, it'll most likely be "You're welcome to try the hospital across town if you'd like...".
- alberth 7y agoI’m confused, so what exactly do the hospitals want to gain from this “medical” credit score? If the hospitals simply want to gain insight on your ability to pay your medical bills, wouldn’t your “normal” credit score be able to provide that insight. What’s different between your “medical” credit score and your normal credit score? Edit: Additionally, there are laws in place in the US that state in emergent situations, no hospital (public or private) can deny care - regardless if you can pay or not. So the article title might be a bit sensationalized.
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoIt is possible that in non-emergency situations, the vast majority of situations, a hospital may deny or change the quality of care based off of your likelihood of paying it off. No one knows the difference between a "medical" credit score and a normal credit score, but we do know that this special, secret credit score is being used to calculate patient treatment.
- alberth 7y agoWouldn’t the easier solution be to not accept patients without insurance (and low co-pays). And given that it’s now a US requirement to have medical insurance, I’m still struggling to understand what this medical credit score is accomplishing.
- alexfromapex 7y agoHere we go killing people over money again
- mayneack 7y agoI usually don't give medical providers my social security number. It's on all their forms, but I just skip that section and no one has ever come back to clarify that it's required. I have no idea if they can require it or not, but I always assumed it was optional because they wouldn't turn away foreigners without SSNs.
- oftenwrong 7y agoAdditionally, some American citizens do not have a Social Security number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-universal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-uni... Bear in mind this fact when working on systems that make use of SSNs.
- ceejayoz 7y agoRefusing to give your SSN doesn't prevent things from showing up on your credit report. https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/accounts-may-be-reported-even-without-social-security-number/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/accounts-may-be-... > Experian doesn't match information to a person's credit history using only the Social Security number. Experian matches information using all of the identification information provided by the lender, so the account will be accurately shown in your report, even if no Social Security number is provided.
- mayneack 7y agoI guess that makes sense. I have been doing it just because I figure it's an easy way to limit my potential data breach exposure. Didn't know about this medical credit score thing.
- nitwit005 7y agoIt's common for people to not give SSN, but they don't need it. A name and date of birth is enough to match you to existing records the overwhelming majority of the time. Phone, address, insurance, and so forth, resolves the majority of what remains. Usually the only time they'll fail to ID you is when you show up to the front desk with no identification and lie about your personal details, which I don't particularly recommend doing.
- tantalor 7y ago> So wealthy people get access to better care and everyone else has to take whatever is available. That's how Canada's healthcare system works, too. > Government health insurance plans give you access to basic medical services. You may also need private insurance to pay for things that government plans don’t fully cover. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/new-immigrants/new-life-canada/health-care-card.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
- Ididntdothis 7y ago”That's how Canada's healthcare system works, too.” Their Standard for basic care is much higher though. You can’t compare that.
- altcognito 7y agoThis is not how Canada's system "works" by definition as their definition of basic health care is a lot wider than the US. The above aspect of "wealthy people get to buy nice things" really doesn't contribute anything interesting to the conversation.
- Spooky23 7y agoNot really. In the US, you get medical coverage if you are old, an honorably discharged veteran, or indigent (either through ER or Medicaid). In Canada, you get Medicare-like primary care, benefit from price controls on drugs, and can buy secondary coverage to get more. In the US, you get to subsidize drug development for the world and enrich a variety of different cartels.
- planetzero 7y agoUniversal care is no different. If your surgery is deemed unnecessary, you really have no chance at getting it. All of my relatives in Canada come over to the US for any major surgery. The reason? The wait time is in years, instead of weeks and some can't get the surgery at all. "Once you start running a hospital like a business, you create an environment of perverse incentives. Care is no longer solely based on what's best for the patient, but how that patient's care relates to the hospital's finances." Government-run care is no different. It doesn't magically solve the issue of treating patients as a number. "So wealthy people get access to better care and everyone else has to take whatever is available" The alternative is that everyone gets access to sub-par care. The answer is an actual free market, rather than another, large middleman monopoly over our health care. We need to get rid of all insurance companies, allow hospitals and doctors to compete over price (which will reduce prices for everything to true values (instead of $80 Aspirin), and only have insurance for surgeries that are rare and can't benefit from the free market. Monopolies are bad for everyone, whether it's big business or the government.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThe wait time for an uninsured person for "unnecessary" surgery in the USA is infinite, which needs to be factored into your calculations here.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoA free market requires informed buyers, there is no way 98% of people can be sufficiently informed about medical issues, nor do they have time to research them. The closest option is to hire an agent of equal ability (i.e. a doctor) to verify the claims of your doctor. Obviously, that's too expensive, so the next closest alternative is to use health insurance companies who do employ many doctors to verify proper treatment options (aka prior authorizations).
- ebiester 7y agoHow does that work for a heart attack? How do you negotiate an emergency open bypass surgery?
- 7y ago
- briffle 7y agoThe video they show in the page has nothing to do with what the article is about. The person is talking about finding eligibility information for patients for things like worker comp, medicare, etc.
- adrr 7y agoIn 2017 financial bureaus changed their scoring system to be more lenient on medical debt and also remove collection reports if paid in full. This stemmed from a state Attorney General settlement against the hospitals that were extorting patients with threats of ruining their credit when disputes between hospitals and insurance companies arouse. Hospitals would just collect from the patients and let the patient deal with the insurance company to recover funds. Hospitals want this leverage again so they built their own credit system.
- JohnFen 7y agoThe medical system in the US is so awful that I already avoid getting medical care unless it's absolutely unavoidable. I guess I need to add "never go to a private hospital" to that habit.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoSame here. Just went to an emergency room with a fever and was charged $700 for 5 minutes with a doctor who told me to go home and stay in bed. I have insurance and had to spend several hours on the phone to get charges reduced to 240.
- rhexs 7y agoWhy did you go to an emergency room for a fever instead of urgent care or a nurse practitioner working out of a grocery store?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoBecause I called the insurance and they told me to go to the emergency room.
- djsumdog 7y agoDid they give you a cost? That's fucking shitty they would encourage you to do something that just earns them money. I fucking hate private insurance (and I worked in it for ~3 years)
- Ididntdothis 7y agoOf course they don’t give you a cost. You are essentially signing a blank check. The hospital can charge whatever they feel like and the insurance can pay whatever share they feel like and you are in the middle trying to figure it out.
- Spooky23 7y ago
- jorblumesea 7y agoAs if the US healthcare system couldn't get more dystopian..
- dwnvoted2hell 7y agoBut I really do care. I do!
- tptacek 7y agoIt's not clear from this article how people are being "denied care" based on this Experian product; the video example provided appears to be about a special need-based admission offering at a provider, not a normal admissions process. In other words: a check that you're poor enough to require the special service.
- gen220 7y agoTacking on to your comment, it's important to realize that hospitals do not usually lose money on patients that can not pay for routine procedures (because of generous government subsidies). The substance of this article certainly smells funny (experian is known to be shady), but it is not as nefarious as the author makes it out to be. For context, hospitals are only likely to lose money on very complex patient cases, i.e. the kinds of program described in the video. In those situations, it makes sense that hospitals will want to make sure that either (1) the patient will be able to pay or (2) charities or government programs will cover them, once they apply. Experian's system claims to helps them make that assessment. Will that lead to patients being turned away? Maybe, but it's not a straightforward conclusion, like you imply. The comparison to Uber ratings holds no water. The reality is that American healthcare is a complicated market with many sources of revenue that aren't patients' bank accounts (charities, govt subsidies, insurance), and it doesn't lend itself well to this kind of oversimplifying analysis.
- tptacek 7y agoTo be clear: the impression I got from the video was that this was a charity that the provider was offering, not that they were using Experian to validate eligibility for other charities.
- gen220 7y agoThe revenue for their charity is most likely dependent on government subsidies that are contingent on the financial status of the patients they're helping. Even though they're determining eligibility for "their own" charity, they're likely determining eligibility for "other charities", if you follow the money.
- cletus 7y agoSo I've come to the conclusion that the US model of private health care is ultimately doomed and nothing will save it. Of course it's going to kill people in the meantime but it is doomed. While on vacation recently I ended up listening to the Bear Brooks podcast [1]. It's a little longwinded at times (but it is aimed at non-technical people) but is not a bad way to spend a long drive. The interesting thing about this story is how advancements in DNA testing have taken us from the simple case of is or is not a match (used in paternity testing and for forensics) to figuring out how much of a match you are. This has created a new field of genetic genealogy that famously led to the identification of the Golden State Killer [2]. So there's a lot of talk about privacy and your DNA but much like having your contact information uploaded by someone else, this is showing that that will be insufficient as your DNA will ultimately be inferred (at least in probability terms) by people who aren't you. There's really no putting this genie back in the bottle. So take a disease like Cystic Fibrosis. Currently this requires life long medication and care. Depending on the severity, you may require one (or more) lung transplants. All of this is expensive. So if you have CF and want to get private insurance in the US this may well be a pre-existing condition and excluded. Now this disease is usually quite apparent from birth but there are other diseases that are not (eg Huntington's). If you'd had a test and know you have it the insurance company has a "right" to know it (if you accept the premise of the US health insurance system, which I, of course, do not). But this is only going to get worse. Ultimately health insurers will able to figure out if you're much more likely to have certain expensive conditions by knowing, say, that a sibling is a carrier (which greatly increases the chances you have it). Taken to its natural conclusion, the system of private health insurance cannot survive. The only workable solution is group health insurance. Sufficiently large groups statistically even out. That's how insurance is meant to work. This could be a fully public health system or something in between (eg state-level). So back to the medical credit score. There will be fights over this. At some point you'll have a right to see it and get corrections. This will probably be championed by states since the Federal government seems to have forfeited, well, governing. But all this is just arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Of course there's still the separate issue of costs (in the US) to deal with but one step at a time. [1]: https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/ https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Killer
- sysbin 7y agoI'm starting to think it's better to not be born (into society today) unless born into a rich family. The sociopaths have no checks & balances and everyone can just watch everything get worse.
- djsumdog 7y agoI'm pretty much an anti-natalist. I don't want kids personally. I'm still fine with other people having them, but I can't morally justify bringing people into this world just to suffer.
- lcfcjs2 7y agoTrump's America.
- petilon 7y agoGreat. Now Experian gets to decide whether you can the surgery you need. They also decide whether you can get a job, rent an apartment, and whether you should remain in police custody [1]. [1] https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/all-media/police-use-experian-marketing-data-for-ai-custody-decisions/ https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/all-media/police-use-experian...
- Zooper 7y agoTo give a real-world example of why this is problematic: my wife recently had surgery, and they had a follow-up a month later to remove a stent. Even though she was insured, a slew of wholly unintelligible bills from various departments at the hospital followed. When she showed up to have her stent removed, the director of the hospital's billing department told her that all past bills must be payed before they are able to remove the stent: this was a blatant lie, and the doctor overrode the decision in about 30min. Now after speaking with the nurses about this, one reveals that the collections department has a whiteboard game going on in the office where they write up their names and have an ongoing competition over who can extract the most money from patients. The hospital and its services are under no obligation to provide accurate pricing until ipso facto, and the pricing can often be changed because it doesn't stand up when placed under scrutiny. Does anyone believe a system like this is capable of producing an accurate "score"?
- merpnderp 7y agoHopefully Congress passes medical price transparency and this game will end, and price competition can truly begin. If a hospital has to publicly announce they charge Blue Cross Blue Shield 20% of what they charge cash patients, they'll be in an untenable position and have to make drastic corrections. I expect a lot of service providers to become untenable after price corrections, go bankrupt, get bought out by more efficient providers who remove all the unproductive staff. Course this is all premised on Congress doing something useful, so...lol.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Reedx 7y agoI just learned, to my surprise, that pricing and transparency changes may go into effect next year. Forcing hospitals to disclose prices: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/health/list-hospital-prices-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/health/list-hospital-pric... Though the hospital industry is fighting it, so we'll have to see if the rule survives.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoA lot of people say you should just not pay crazy charges from hospitals and wait until they reduce or drop them. I bet hospitals want to track people who do that. They want patients who will pay whatever kind of charges hospitals dream without questioning anything.
- pdkl95 7y agoSpeaking of medical billing insanity... I recently had a MRI, and in the process of filling out the usual new-patient form at the imaging center, they wanted me to sign a blank LCD touchscreen. No indication whatsoever what I would be signing. Is it even a contract if you never saw the offer and thus no "meeting of the minds"? After explaining that I wasn't going to sign a "blank check" contract (and would always need to read the entire contract before first), they eventually figured out how print the actual document. After several minutes reading the 8 page (!) contract, I found a clause I haven't seen before. After more or less normal stuff about agreeing to pay for the service, in a section about sending the bill to a collection agency if I didn't pay, they wanted me to agree to 1) pay for the collection agency and any other fees associated with recovering the debt, and 2) pay their attorney fees if they decided to take me to court over the debt. I wounder a judge would actually enforce that clause. Agreeing to pay someone to sue yourself seems unconscionable. I told them I wouldn't sign their unreasonable contract (that wasn't the only problem) and they sent me off to have the MRI scan anyway.
- jiveturkey 7y ago> I wounder a judge would actually enforce that clause. Yes. It's a normal and enforceable clause. It's very common in all kinds of contracts.
- dfxm12 7y agoDepending on the situation, it could be reasonable to argue that you were under duress or undue influence to sign the contract. This is all situation dependent, of course, but it is probably rare that an individual would have the resources and wherewithal to win such a case anyway (which is another problem).
- gnopgnip 7y agoTypically the attorney fee assignment clauses go both ways, and the prevailing party has their fees paid. In some jurisdictions one sided clauses can be thrown out
- petilon 7y ago
- mnm1 7y agoHere's another version, besides the private insurance companies themselves, of the death panels opponents of universal healthcare always blabber on about. Now we have two branches of death panels, each one slightly differently evil. Yet another issue that would be solved by universal healthcare.
- rcar 7y agoI've worked extensively with credit bureau data, and there's a fair bit of misinformation both in the article and the comments. First, bureaus get very little detailed information about the episode of care that led to the medical bill: essentially, they'll just get info on when the bill was due and what amount on it is still overdue, plus enough info on the patient to match it to the right person (name, address, phone, SSN if available). HIPAA and similar legislation allows the sharing of billing data like this, and no other PII (or any PHI) gets shared in the process. Second, medical debts have been a part of bureau data for a while now. What's new here is that Experian is trying to build a machine learning model on it to try to sell the model as a new product. I've never worked for any of the bureaus before but know many people who do, and in general, these specialized scores seldom sell well, but since the marginal cost to Experian is low (let a few data scientists at it for a few weeks), they still put out new ones anyway. Even things like new FICO/Vantage scores like the new FICO that's been in the news lately tend to take a while (on the order of years) to make it out into the wild since lenders like to have consistency in their processes as long as possible. Third, it's actually beneficial to most consumers to have medical debts split out of the bureau data explicitly. Most big lenders use raw bureau data much more than the aggregated credit scores, and since the US medical system has so many distortions that correspond more to broken processes rather than a person's creditworthiness, many exclude medical debts from consideration explicitly, and others implicitly as models they build don't often find those attributes as useful as others. All in all, it's good to be thoughtful about how information like this is disseminated and used, but the dire warnings of the article are really not warranted in this case.
- rglover 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcwyOaYyu7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcwyOaYyu7Y
- r00fus 7y agoYet another reason for single-payer.
- djsumdog 7y agoI really hate it when people response to single payer with "I don't trust the Government to..." First, Medicare/Medicate are contracted out to all the same health care companies that currently do employer insurance. They're given tighter money constraints and can't waste as much. A singler payer would mean contracting out. Private companies wouldn't go away, they'd become government contractors, would need to reduce waste, stop useless advertising and probably layoff a ton of useless people. I agree though, we desperately need fully universal healthcare .. where everyone gets the exact same level of care because they're a citizen or tax paying legal permanent-resident.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cft 7y agoI have been traveling in Latin America for the past 2.5 years. In Mexico, life expectancy is 77 years, pretty much the same as in the US. An American retiree expat told me that his MRI cost him $200 here, versus $3500 in the US. I have been to doctors too. A typical payment for a doctor visit is $30 cash, less than my copay in the US. I had a stomach parasite from Guatemala when I flew back to the US. My PCP scheduled tests, then more tests, copays, bills and finally a $200 medication. While doing all this, I simply took a Mexican anti parasitic medication that I bought for $1 (one dollar) in Arrilaga, and it went away, before I got the $200 medication! I think the medical field here in Mexico is much more affordable because it's cash based, with real competition between doctors
- young_blood 7y agoI recently received treatment for Hodgkin's Lymphoma and have been trudging through bills for the past 3 years. I've found that most if not all of my medical bills contained errors, which had I not looked into, would've cost me in excess of $10k+. The most common error was the billing department submitting a bill to my insurance company months after the date I received the services. I wrote a post explaining how I used python OCR to look for these discrepancies. My father is also a pharmacist (and now owns a pharmacy) and he constantly tells me horror stories about the cat and mouse game that insurers play with patients, where they have doctors prescribe and offer discounts on specific drugs, depending on what is most profitable. He pointed to an interesting bit of software [1] that uses machine learning to find the best margins. I could seriously go on and on about all the insanity that is our healthcare system. These problems runs deep, from top to bottom. [1] - https://amplicare.com/ https://amplicare.com/
- jiveturkey 7y agoIt's too bad TFA doesn't mention either way whether a credit freeze will prevent hospitals from obtaining information on you. A bing search reveals nothing. OT: I left google and use bing now. Interesting, google's search results for my query were absolutely horrible. obvious spam and various detritus. and all the results had the little ad icon ^W^W favicon! I thought they backtracked from that? oh well.
- ycombonator 7y agoMaybe congress should actually focus on privacy legislations than being obsessed with orange man.
- alpineidyll3 7y agoGreat to see healthcare sector innovating in new levels of depravity. These people put the Marquis de Sade to shame.
- doubleunplussed 7y agoVote for Sanders or Warren, folks.
- djsumdog 7y agoIt doesn't matter if they believe in standard health care, they have to be able to implement it, which is going to be very difficult for anyone, no matter if they have a D or an R behind their name.
- mtgx 7y agoSo what are you saying? That you'd rather vote for someone that doesn't even try to fight for it? All major changes start small at first. Sanders has 1 million people giving him recurring donations month after month - that means something. It means he can organize those people to put pressure on every single Congressman or Senator. And it could become more than 1 million ecstatic supporters if he gets the nomination and then presidency.
- LatteLazy 7y agoI mean, in a for-profit system you can't blame them. But at the same time, this seems insane to me. Thank god we (still, just) have the NHS...
- vkaku 7y agoThe medical system in the US needs more regulations, and people should push their politicians to fix this, or vote them out.
- bunchOfCucks 7y agoNot worried, blockchain will solve this.
- nojvek 7y agoYou walk into to a supermarket to buy a bottle of milk. None of the items have prices. There isn’t even milk on the shelves. You present your supermarket card to someone and then talk to a consultant who then does a bunch of tests and gets you milk plus some other items (which have high margins - like a special green bottle cap) Then you go home and receive separate bills that trickle over several months. One from milk consultant, one from the doorman, one from the cleaner and other folks you never even met. The total bill could buy you a truck of milk in other countries but you’re glad you have supermarket insurance and you only pay the price of 10 gallons of milk out of pocket.
- BrandonEli 7y agoIT CAN REALLY BE A HUGE MINUS SOMETIMES
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rainhacker 7y agoI wonder Experian will buy fitness trackers/apps data now and use it in ratings.
- Kelli77653 7y agoI had my credit increased from 420 to 800 within a short time with the help of bbirdeye1@gmail.com some from here linked me up with them, at first I was skeptical about it but I contacted him because I needed to get a loan, now my family is happy and grateful to bbirdeye1@gmail.com. I have recommended him to few of my friends and you can contact them through email if you need your credit fixed too...