4 ms·
Your employer picks a plan for you, which isn't what you need. You go to your doctor, who then tries to treat you. But then has to fight an insurance company w
by JimTheMan 6y ago
Your employer picks a plan for you, which isn't what you need.
You go to your doctor, who then tries to treat you. But then has to fight an insurance company who wants treatment that isn't in your best interests or isn't covered by the employer plan.
You get home and discover your Doctor is out of network. Pay up. You spend a million years fighting the insurance company.
OR your insurance is good, so the doctor says, what the hell I will order that test that is nice to have. They'll cover it. Costs increase.
Or you go to the emergency room, run up bills for the hospital and leave without paying. The taxpayer foots the bill.
And the doctors pay through the teeth for their degrees and want a big return. They earn more than other countries in a significant way.
All the incentives are out of whack and not in the public's interest.
- free_rms 6y agoNot to mention squads of clerks at every single doctor's office doing battle with entire armies at the insurers in a many-to-many clusterfuck of epic proportions over every single bit of care delivered.
- Apocryphon 6y agoAlso America is the most litigious society in the world [0], making medical malpractice suits an ever-present threat in everyone's minds; but tort reform does not help taxpayers, and hurts patients [1]. [0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/03/why-us-litigious/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/12/03/why-us-lit... [1] https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/medical_malpractice_fact_sheet.pdf https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/medical_malpracti...
- free_rms 6y agoI'm not super educated on this but I thought that malpractice insurance basically "handled" the problem at a reasonable overhead compared to other gross inefficiencies.
- gorbachev 6y agoThe costs of malpractice insurance vary a lot based on specialty and location: https://www.leveragerx.com/blog/medical-malpractice-insurance-cost/ https://www.leveragerx.com/blog/medical-malpractice-insuranc... A few years back I was reading articles on how doctors were changing specialties or retiring entirely due to the high cost of malpractice insurance. I'm not sure if the situation has changed since, however.
- troupe 6y agoI recently had a surgery done and we weren't sure it was going to be covered by insurance. I wanted to make sure I knew how much of a liability I was taking on by moving ahead before knowing about insurance. I was told the insurance was going to be billed $150k, but if they didn't pay, they would only charge me $15k as the cash price. I was ok with that since the surgery was important and insurance did pay, but that type of pricing variation is why healthcare is so expensive in the US.
- wang_li 6y agoThere are places where they don’t use insurance, it’s cash only. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma does cash only and will tell you the cost before you even contact a surgeon or specialist. It’s on their website. You can also get mri images done for very low cost of you pay cash. https://surgerycenterok.com/ https://surgerycenterok.com/ https://affordablemri.com/ https://affordablemri.com/