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This hits home for me.. my son (now 4 years old) was born very premature at 29 weeks and some change. He spent 7 weeks and 4 days in the NICU. The total hospita
by rakmos 5y ago
This hits home for me.. my son (now 4 years old) was born very premature at 29 weeks and some change. He spent 7 weeks and 4 days in the NICU. The total hospital bill that was charged to insurance (before settling it between themselves) was roughly 960_000$.
If you include the additional services and whatnot in the few months following being discharged from the hospital he was a million dollar baby.
Complete insanity frankly.. few things make my blood boil more than the sad state of health insurance in the US. Sure, it has gotten better since the ACA… but there is soo much more that needs to change.
- enriquec 5y agoBy what metric have things gotten better since the ACA?
- ceejayoz 5y agoOne very clear one: Access to insurance for folks with expensive preexisting conditions.
- rakmos 5y agoWell for one, my son could be labelled as having a pre-existing condition as a result of the premature birth.
- swashboon 5y agoavailability, coverage, cost
- dexterdog 5y agoUm, not cost.
- only_as_i_fall 5y agoDepends on who you ask. Before Obamacare if your employer didn't pick a great insurance plan and you got seriously sick the insurance could cut you off after you hit a lifetime maximum and then future policies wouldn't cover that specific condition because it was considered pre-existing. This happened to my parents in the 90s and we went through multiple lifetime maximums and had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of 10 years. Obamacare is great for making health insurance actually act like insurance.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoYeah, they forgot the cost part. It probably didn’t help that the republicans did whatever they could do to kill ACA instead of trying to improve it.
- aksss 5y agoPeople on individual market with no subsidies (making over, say $50k) got absolutely raped by the ACA. It's great that many uninsured got insurance, but many people like myself spent years uninsured post-ACA because the cost was higher than a mortgage payment with absolutely zero realized benefit until the massively high deductible was met. People who couldn't afford this were then charged thousands by the IRS as a penalty with zero benefit. I find myself not a fan of it from a policy perspective. Didn't like the way it was passed, written, or implemented. Some good effects, but truly bad effects as well. Scrapping the mandate was beneficial for people in my position (starting businesses), but still the healthcare system in the US is a train wreck. It's neither a free market system nor a public system. It is fundamentally broken unless you are an employee of a larger corporation that offers benefits.
- wilde 5y agoMedical bankruptcies. https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/04/30/affordable-care-act-lived-promise-buffering-bankruptcy-risk-study-shows https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/04/30/affordable-care-ac...
- zikduruqe 5y agoI filed for bankruptcy about 10 years ago due to a family member's medical bills. Funny, a year afterwards, when establishing credit again, all the financial institutions were like "yep, no problem, it happens". 24 months later, credit was back to normal-ish, bought new car, financed new home, and no medical debt.
- hermannj314 5y agoI believe ACA was originally meant to be even stronger, with a universal option and that was opposed. I agree with you that we should revisit and strengthen ACA and add that component back in.
- enragedcacti 5y agoHere are a number of metrics that have improved since the ACA. - percent uninsured decreased - number of people skipping treatment for cost reasons decreased - number of people with "pre-existing conditions" covered increased - satisfaction with coverage increased - growth of healthcare costs slowed Not to mention other provisions that are broadly popular such as children being allowed to stay on their parents health insurance through the age of 26 and mandates that require all plans to cover basic services. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/chart-book-accomplishments-of-affordable-care-act https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/chart-book-accomplishme...
- hungryforcodes 5y agoThat's insane. At most it would have cost just a few thousand in many countries in Asia with comparable medical competencies. So is there a new strategy of going to non-western countries to deliver babies and have expensive surgeries? Of course I don't need to mention that in Canada and most countries in Europe this wouldn't have even been an issue. That would be pedantic. /s
- carschno 5y agoNot entirely true any more, unfortunately. Many (Western) Europeans go to countries like Poland, Hungary, Turkey for treatments that are typically not (fully) covered by health insurances, like manydental or laser eye surgery. There are private clinics specialized on Western European patient with staff speaking fluent English, German etc.
- tomwojcik 5y agoPole here. Recently my friend gave birth at 27 weeks to two boys, 700g (1.5 pound) each. Premature newborns spent over 3 months in the hospital (pediatric ICU), were unable to breathe by themselves. Parents got vaccinated in January against corona and the official "early birds" vaccination process for the population started about 3 months later (for public service). Everything was free of charge. I can't imagine having to pay for a visit in the hospital. EDIT: Also, I know a guy from Denmark who flies to Poland just to fix his teeth.
- wil421 5y agoThe billing system is a complete farce. Here’s a large made up number for the total bill, ok here’s another large number because we like your insurance, and finally here’s what your insurance actually paid. My wife had complications the first time and the total bill was like $35k, insurance paid $9k, and our cost was $0. We actually got our $250 admission back. Nobody pays the made of number from the first bill not even the uninsured.
- wonderwonder 5y agoSure, but if they stress you out enough with the made up numbers you will be a return customer sooner than you would like.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago“Nobody pays the made of number from the first bill not even the uninsured.” This is maybe true but the actual number you pay is a total gamble depending on whatever the hospital feels like they can discount this month, whatever loopholes the insurance has found for not paying, whatever hoops the insurance or hospital have set up and you have jumped through correctly or not and how much time you have for the next few months or years to fight the bill. It’s a totally insane and arbitrary system. Probably the pinnacle of a large and unaccountable bureaucracy. Sometimes I wonder if dealing with the mob is a more straightforward and reliable thing vs going to a hospital.
- jrs235 5y ago>It’s a totally insane and arbitrary system. And therefore it's always a gamble of whether one should go in and causes many to not go when they should because "is this really worth we potentially having a thousand plus dollar bill?"
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThat’s my position. Especially with deductibles I am very hesitant to go to a doctor. Is it really worth $3000 deductible plus other unknowable cost to have something checked out?
- yunohn 5y ago> he was a million dollar baby Imagine the life you could setup for a child, with a million dollars to start off with. Instead, it just lines the pockets of the corrupt healthcare industry.
- weavie 5y agoWow. My daughter was born at 25 weeks and spend 4 months and 1 day in NICU, just over 10 years ago. This was in the UK. If my memory serves me correctly (which it may not, my brain was pretty fried throughout that time), we were told that the total cost to the NHS was roughly 150,000 GBP.
- inglor 5y agoIn Israel we have public healthcare. I was born at week 32 and spent about 6 weeks in the NICU - everything was free. It's not always great and I do pay for private insurance in case I need something urgent - but everything emergency is absolutely covered. I believe it's this state in most developed places that are not the US?
- 101008 5y agoSame in Argentina.
- CountDrewku 5y agoEverything was not free, you just didn't pay directly for it while you were at the hospital. I don't understand why the word free always gets thrown around for country's with socialized medicine. You are paying for it.
- dbspin 5y agoBecause mental funds are non-fungible. Amortising health costs through progressive income tax helps a) keep overall costs down, as the state centrally organises the health system / collectively negotiates with providers and b) is more fair. It doesn't feel like you're being utterly screwed through no fault of your own - e.g.: medical bill after an accident or violent attack. Instead society at large acknowledges two things a) we all need medical care and b) our need is largely disconnected from our capacity to pay.
- runjake 5y agoYou don’t need to explain this. Everyone knows how “socialized medicine” works. What they are saying is that it was zero out-of-pocket as opposed to a quarter of a million dollar bill.
- CountDrewku 5y agoCool well since we're going with that logic I'll just go ahead and say my insurance provide through work is free.
- jhot 5y agoSame. My wife gave birth last year at 26 weeks. 3 months in the NICU was over $1MM and that doesn't even include the delivery. We were extremely fortunate that my wife works and has good insurance because I had just been laid off a couple weeks prior. We were big proponents of a medicare-for-all-like system before all that, and even bigger proponents now.