10 ms·

Health System in Minnesota Cuts Off Patients with Medical Debt

89 points by lxm 3y ago

notRobot 3y ago
It's 2023. You shouldn't have to struggle as much as you have to just for basic necessities like shelter, food, medicine, education and utilities. This is true of most places in the world. It is sad. Because it doesn't have to be this way. There isn't a lack of resources. There's unequal and unjust distribution of resources.
- debacle 3y ago
  > There isn't a lack of resources. There is absolutely a lack of resources when it comes to medical care. There aren't enough nurses, doctors, mental health professionals, specialized medical equipment, or in some instances even blood, to go around right now. This "post scarcity" mentality isn't based on reality.
  - jquery 3y ago
    There's enough to go around in every country approaching a significant fraction of America's average per capita GDP. No structural reason America couldn't make it work either.
    - Georgelemental 3y ago
      Not really no, those countries generally ration with very long wait times instead of by price. (Not defending the US system, which is 100% captured by special interest sleazebags, and in need of total regulatory overhaul. But there is no magic bullet to fix all problems here)
      - jquery 3y ago
        They generally have better health outcomes at the population level, so functionally speaking I think that's "plenty to go around" in the most useful sense of the term.
      - sharemywin 3y ago
        especially since the wait times are in the US now too.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - UnpossibleJim 3y ago
    It's a matter of priorities. If we decide these things are important as a nation they don't have to be scarce. We make the best war machines on the planet and spend a lot of money on them. That is more of a priority than the good health of our nation.
    - WhatWorkingOn 3y ago
      A war machine can be built once and maintained for a long time. Medical care is a personal and time consuming process with multiple parties and tests that need to be coordinated across. All of this is expensive because for every person being given that time of day, there's someone else that needs it. There aren't enough hours in the day and smart people in the country to scale up healthcare. Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is a scarcity of intelligent people willing to devote their entire lives to the study of medicine across specialties. If you cannot afford it, the US healthcare is terrible. If you have the means to afford it, the US healthcare system is one of if not the best in the world.
      - hedora 3y ago
        > If you have the means to afford it, the US healthcare system is one of if not the best in the world. This is untrue according to all metrics I have seen (such as life expectancy). Do you have any evidence to back this statement up?
        shuckles 3y ago
        The drivers of poor US life expectancy is mostly guns and cars. Cars are the #1 killer of Americans between 5 and 45 (approximately). That doesn’t have much to do with the medical system.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        Leading causes of death in the US: https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death 10 of the leading 12 causes of death are diseases, with the first non-disease cause coming in at #4.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Bringing up "post scarcity" here is a straw man. The US medical system has been systematically optimized for extracting the maximum possible amount of money from every patient, part of which is artificially restricting available supply of medical care (although things are slightly getting better in that regard with practicing nurses and PAs) The other thing it was optimized for was hiding this from the patients. And only now, in 2023 are we beginning to see the horrible extent of this, because of price transparency rules.
- carabiner 3y ago
  It's lack of will.
- jojobas 3y ago
  So, someone should be working to provide you with medicine, education and utilities and paid for that by... someone else?
  - throwaway173738 3y ago
    Are you trying to argue that beneficiaries of tax-funded systems like roads, medicare, unemployment, etc don’t pay taxes? Because everyone in the US pays some kind of tax to fund something unless they’re not an adult yet. I’ve worked with several very competent people who were on unemployment at some point but who also paid into unemployment for most of their lives.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Sure, everyone pays taxes. I'm pretty well set and I'm still not sure I'll ever pay enough in taxes to cover one of those famous US hospital bills. Then again, it should be matter of at least a majority agreement that things like that should be paid from taxes, and it's obvious that in the US the agreement is not there.
  - kashunstva 3y ago
    > someone should be working to provide you with medicine, education… Are you seriously arguing against taxpayer-funded education? As broken as U.S. public education is, managed as it is by hyper-local, ideologically-motivated officials, withdrawing the opportunity to raise one’s lot in life through community-funded education would be pretty dystopian. Or perhaps you were referring to post-secondary education only?
- seer 3y ago
  The most weird thing for me is that there _are_ places in the world where that’s not the case, places where shelter / food / medicine / security are if not solved, at least close to stress free, and why others are not studying them intensely to try to replicate it is just bonkers. Not invented here syndrome is so strong when it comes to politics…
  - notRobot 3y ago
    Yeah, I agree! I think it really shows what the priorities of the people in power are. It's not about making the world a better place for the masses, since clearly they're not doing that. It's about maintaining power structures and a status quo that concentrates wealth (and thus power, and thus more wealth, and thus more power) in the hands of a few.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  You can expand medical expenses practically boundlessly. The longer you make people live the more they cost.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It doesn't even have to be "end of life" care (the last ten years, say). You just start doing more and more procedures "just in case". MRIs and CAT scans for everything! It'll probably catch something.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  > shelter, food, medicine, education and utilities Many of these really aren't resources though. Lumber, iron, and oil are resources but shelter, medicine, and utilities are all products made with resources. Education isn't even either, it's a service. Whether they are all necessities today is up to opinion, and I expect the are good arguments to be made that they are all necessary, but they definitely aren't resources.
EscapeFromNY 3y ago
Classic doublespeak. > “Allina Health’s goal is, and will always be, to have zero patients go without services for financial reasons,” ... while explaining why they made the choice to withhold services for financial reasons. It's their right to do so, but don't lie about it.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  They're doing it for your safety and protection...or something.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
The only one to blame for people not getting healthcare is the federal US government. These articles help politicians deflect from the fact that no one other than the US government could possibly provide unlimited healthcare. An individual hospital or healthcare business deciding it cannot afford the losses is just that, a business decision. And since it does not have the power to raise taxes, that is what they have to do.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  > No one other than the US government could possibly provide unlimited healthcare. Not even they could do that. I've lived in a country with universal government-funded healthcare; many things are better than the US system (low bar, I know), but wait times are very long and standards of care aren't magically any less sucky.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I agree, a more accurate version would be whatever the closest thing to unlimited healthcare would be, while still being able to operate the rest of society.
    - ephemeralkey 3y ago
      Medicare, Medicaid (Some states better than others), Veteran Affairs Health system. There are definitely examples of universal healthcare that seems to operate well in small universes. From CMS on National Health Expenditure [1]: > NHE grew 2.7% to $4.3 trillion in 2021, or $12,914 per person, and accounted for 18.3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). > On average over 2021-30, National Health Expenditures (NHE) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are both projected to grow 5.1 percent per year; as a result, the projected NHE share of GDP in 2030 (19.6 percent) is similar to 2020 (19.7 percent). McKinsey [2] cites > Of the nearly $4 trillion spent on healthcare annually in the United States, administrative spending is about one-quarter of the total; delivery of care is about three-quarters. Nearly a trillion dollars in administrative spending that could otherwise go into care delivery! (Yes, some administrative spending will remain, but the pie is so large). That just shows that entrenched forces are strong. [1]: https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta... [2]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/administrative-simplification-how-to-save-a-quarter-trillion-dollars-in-us-healthcare https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/...
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Ever heard of preeclampsia? Me neither, till last week. Now my wife and I will be in the hospital for another 8 weeks. I’m super looking forward to the bill. In reality I’m grateful we live in the future. One overlooked thing with medical debt is that while it’s awful, you still end up healthy at the end of it. A hundred years ago we wouldn’t have been so lucky. It’s weird waking up in a hospital each day. Time starts to lose meaning. There are only so many times you can count the ceiling tiles. I wonder what nine weeks in the hospital will end up being though. $100k seems not even close to the bottom line price.
- s5300 3y ago
  [dead]
- kneebonian 3y ago
  Forgive me for asking but does your insurance not have a max out of pocket associated with your plan? Btw I understand and feel you how rough the hospital is, had 4 little ones each spending several months in the NICU hold on it gets better and the debt will eventually be gone.
  - missedthecue 3y ago
    This is what I don't get about discussions of US healthcare online. Everyone has a max out of pocket. Yes, 7% of the US isn't insured, which is a lot, but it's hard to believe they make up 99.9% of healthcare discourse. Are people genuinely getting $100k in debt, or are they only telling the internet how much the total bill was and forgetting to add that their insurance picked up $94k of that.
    - projectileboy 3y ago
      I’m 51 and had this conversation too many times to indulge this. All I can say is that I wish you luck if you or your loved ones ever have a serious medical issue in the US. And you may be lucky. Or you may spend years on telephone calls trying to get a pharmacy benefits manager to send you the prescription your doctor prescribed. Or calls with your insurance company to get them to pay what they are supposed to pay.
kneebonian 3y ago
It seems that two very different but similar issues get lumped under the "healthcare" umbrella. 1. Is prescriptions people talk about how medicine is too expensive and they have to ration it. 2. The other problem is the surprise medical billing that people get hit with. that lasts forever and cripples them. These seems to be the.major complaints I hear about the healthcare system, and yet are 2 very different issues with different origins and solutions. Yet no one seems interested in solving the problems but instead just arguing (for and against) about universal healthcare or single payer healthcare or whatever the euphemism of the week is.
apayan 3y ago
http://archive.today/ozyyG http://archive.today/ozyyG
Jedd 3y ago
One of the handful of objectively positive things to come out of the COVID19 pandemic is a significantly increased awareness amongst many citizens of the USA just how uniquely awful their healthcare system (and to a lesser extent welfare system and award conditions) is/are. I'm sure the comparisons have been made for many years, but by mid-2020 it felt like almost everyone in the USA must have been exposed to some hard truths about how 'the rest of the west' handles these fairly fundamental services. As an Australian, and I suspect the Brits and others feel similarly, the pandemic also reminded us of what we stand to lose if we were to allow the eagerly nefarious agents to talk us out of (AU) Medicare or (UK) NHS, etc.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  > I'm sure the comparisons have been made for many years, but by mid-2020 it felt like almost everyone in the USA must have been exposed to some hard truths about how 'the rest of the west' handles these fairly fundamental services. You'd hope, but that type of facts and rhetoric wasn't seized upon by the media or political parties. A good amount of people were never exposed to that information nor its consequences, let alone the consequences of our negligence towards health and social services. People were happy to get some checks and extended unemployment, and a lot of people were angry about those checks and extended unemployment. A good chunk of people wouldn't have given a shit about how well your country was doing if you were wearing masks.
  - Jedd 3y ago
    Yeah, I suspect it's more nuanced than it seemed to me at the time. You say it wasn't seized upon by media etc, but perhaps it just wasn't by the media you (or I) was consuming? The USA media I consumed - Seth Meyer, John Oliver, some reddit / imgur - tends towards the more thoughtful / empathetic / liberal demographics, but unarguably is a bubble of sorts. I suspect, but also have no hard data, that the younger generation, generally more 'connected' and exposed to more of this type of information, was instrumental in extracting that orange chap, and I speculate much of that motivation came from this vector. Though how much of that was pandemic-highlighting of poor and unfair health services vs other factors .. well, who knows. Exit polls only get you so far, assuming these kinds of questions were ever asked.
pcurve 3y ago
"Ms. Blaido, a mechanic, said she racked up nearly $200,000 in bills from a two-week stay at Allina’s Mercy Hospital in 2009 for complications from pneumonia, along with several visits to the emergency department for asthma flare-ups. Ms. Blaido, a mother of four, said that most of the hospital stay was not covered by her health insurance" I'm confused. There is out of pocket maximum of $18,000 for a family that caps what patient has to pay for in a given year. That's the law. For ER room, you don't have to worry about out of network hospital.
sharts 3y ago
This is most people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIAFe7zaCRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIAFe7zaCRU No amount of medical intervention is going to fix terrible lifestyle choices and a culture that promotes them. There are a multitude of factors that go into making our lives decay to the point of needing medical treatment and those are things we should be focusing on. Doctors aren't miracle workers. Why is the CEO of McDonalds not required, by law, to eat Big Macs for 2/3s of his/her meals every day?
- hellojesus 3y ago
  You jest, surely. Someone offering a product or service is not forcing anyone to consume it. Should we force alcohol vendors to drink only alcohol?

89 points by lxm 3y ago

It's 2023. You shouldn't have to struggle as much as you have to just for basic necessities like shelter, food, medicine, education and utilities. This is true of most places in the world. It is sad. Because it doesn't have to be this way. There isn't a lack of resources. There's unequal and unjust distribution of resources.

debacle 3y ago
> There isn't a lack of resources. There is absolutely a lack of resources when it comes to medical care. There aren't enough nurses, doctors, mental health professionals, specialized medical equipment, or in some instances even blood, to go around right now. This "post scarcity" mentality isn't based on reality.
- jquery 3y ago
  There's enough to go around in every country approaching a significant fraction of America's average per capita GDP. No structural reason America couldn't make it work either.
  - Georgelemental 3y ago
    Not really no, those countries generally ration with very long wait times instead of by price. (Not defending the US system, which is 100% captured by special interest sleazebags, and in need of total regulatory overhaul. But there is no magic bullet to fix all problems here)
    - jquery 3y ago
      They generally have better health outcomes at the population level, so functionally speaking I think that's "plenty to go around" in the most useful sense of the term.
    - sharemywin 3y ago
      especially since the wait times are in the US now too.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- UnpossibleJim 3y ago
  It's a matter of priorities. If we decide these things are important as a nation they don't have to be scarce. We make the best war machines on the planet and spend a lot of money on them. That is more of a priority than the good health of our nation.
  - WhatWorkingOn 3y ago
    A war machine can be built once and maintained for a long time. Medical care is a personal and time consuming process with multiple parties and tests that need to be coordinated across. All of this is expensive because for every person being given that time of day, there's someone else that needs it. There aren't enough hours in the day and smart people in the country to scale up healthcare. Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is a scarcity of intelligent people willing to devote their entire lives to the study of medicine across specialties. If you cannot afford it, the US healthcare is terrible. If you have the means to afford it, the US healthcare system is one of if not the best in the world.
    - hedora 3y ago
      > If you have the means to afford it, the US healthcare system is one of if not the best in the world. This is untrue according to all metrics I have seen (such as life expectancy). Do you have any evidence to back this statement up?
      - shuckles 3y ago
        The drivers of poor US life expectancy is mostly guns and cars. Cars are the #1 killer of Americans between 5 and 45 (approximately). That doesn’t have much to do with the medical system.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        Leading causes of death in the US: https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death 10 of the leading 12 causes of death are diseases, with the first non-disease cause coming in at #4.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Bringing up "post scarcity" here is a straw man. The US medical system has been systematically optimized for extracting the maximum possible amount of money from every patient, part of which is artificially restricting available supply of medical care (although things are slightly getting better in that regard with practicing nurses and PAs) The other thing it was optimized for was hiding this from the patients. And only now, in 2023 are we beginning to see the horrible extent of this, because of price transparency rules.
carabiner 3y ago
It's lack of will.
jojobas 3y ago
So, someone should be working to provide you with medicine, education and utilities and paid for that by... someone else?
- throwaway173738 3y ago
  Are you trying to argue that beneficiaries of tax-funded systems like roads, medicare, unemployment, etc don’t pay taxes? Because everyone in the US pays some kind of tax to fund something unless they’re not an adult yet. I’ve worked with several very competent people who were on unemployment at some point but who also paid into unemployment for most of their lives.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Sure, everyone pays taxes. I'm pretty well set and I'm still not sure I'll ever pay enough in taxes to cover one of those famous US hospital bills. Then again, it should be matter of at least a majority agreement that things like that should be paid from taxes, and it's obvious that in the US the agreement is not there.
- kashunstva 3y ago
  > someone should be working to provide you with medicine, education… Are you seriously arguing against taxpayer-funded education? As broken as U.S. public education is, managed as it is by hyper-local, ideologically-motivated officials, withdrawing the opportunity to raise one’s lot in life through community-funded education would be pretty dystopian. Or perhaps you were referring to post-secondary education only?
seer 3y ago
The most weird thing for me is that there _are_ places in the world where that’s not the case, places where shelter / food / medicine / security are if not solved, at least close to stress free, and why others are not studying them intensely to try to replicate it is just bonkers. Not invented here syndrome is so strong when it comes to politics…
- notRobot 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree! I think it really shows what the priorities of the people in power are. It's not about making the world a better place for the masses, since clearly they're not doing that. It's about maintaining power structures and a status quo that concentrates wealth (and thus power, and thus more wealth, and thus more power) in the hands of a few.
faeriechangling 3y ago
You can expand medical expenses practically boundlessly. The longer you make people live the more they cost.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It doesn't even have to be "end of life" care (the last ten years, say). You just start doing more and more procedures "just in case". MRIs and CAT scans for everything! It'll probably catch something.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
> shelter, food, medicine, education and utilities Many of these really aren't resources though. Lumber, iron, and oil are resources but shelter, medicine, and utilities are all products made with resources. Education isn't even either, it's a service. Whether they are all necessities today is up to opinion, and I expect the are good arguments to be made that they are all necessary, but they definitely aren't resources.

EscapeFromNY 3y ago

Classic doublespeak. > “Allina Health’s goal is, and will always be, to have zero patients go without services for financial reasons,” ... while explaining why they made the choice to withhold services for financial reasons. It's their right to do so, but don't lie about it.

antisthenes 3y ago
They're doing it for your safety and protection...or something.

lotsofpulp 3y ago

The only one to blame for people not getting healthcare is the federal US government. These articles help politicians deflect from the fact that no one other than the US government could possibly provide unlimited healthcare. An individual hospital or healthcare business deciding it cannot afford the losses is just that, a business decision. And since it does not have the power to raise taxes, that is what they have to do.

Georgelemental 3y ago
> No one other than the US government could possibly provide unlimited healthcare. Not even they could do that. I've lived in a country with universal government-funded healthcare; many things are better than the US system (low bar, I know), but wait times are very long and standards of care aren't magically any less sucky.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I agree, a more accurate version would be whatever the closest thing to unlimited healthcare would be, while still being able to operate the rest of society.
  - ephemeralkey 3y ago
    Medicare, Medicaid (Some states better than others), Veteran Affairs Health system. There are definitely examples of universal healthcare that seems to operate well in small universes. From CMS on National Health Expenditure [1]: > NHE grew 2.7% to $4.3 trillion in 2021, or $12,914 per person, and accounted for 18.3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). > On average over 2021-30, National Health Expenditures (NHE) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are both projected to grow 5.1 percent per year; as a result, the projected NHE share of GDP in 2030 (19.6 percent) is similar to 2020 (19.7 percent). McKinsey [2] cites > Of the nearly $4 trillion spent on healthcare annually in the United States, administrative spending is about one-quarter of the total; delivery of care is about three-quarters. Nearly a trillion dollars in administrative spending that could otherwise go into care delivery! (Yes, some administrative spending will remain, but the pie is so large). That just shows that entrenched forces are strong. [1]: https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta... [2]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/administrative-simplification-how-to-save-a-quarter-trillion-dollars-in-us-healthcare https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/...

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Ever heard of preeclampsia? Me neither, till last week. Now my wife and I will be in the hospital for another 8 weeks. I’m super looking forward to the bill. In reality I’m grateful we live in the future. One overlooked thing with medical debt is that while it’s awful, you still end up healthy at the end of it. A hundred years ago we wouldn’t have been so lucky. It’s weird waking up in a hospital each day. Time starts to lose meaning. There are only so many times you can count the ceiling tiles. I wonder what nine weeks in the hospital will end up being though. $100k seems not even close to the bottom line price.

s5300 3y ago
[dead]
kneebonian 3y ago
Forgive me for asking but does your insurance not have a max out of pocket associated with your plan? Btw I understand and feel you how rough the hospital is, had 4 little ones each spending several months in the NICU hold on it gets better and the debt will eventually be gone.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  This is what I don't get about discussions of US healthcare online. Everyone has a max out of pocket. Yes, 7% of the US isn't insured, which is a lot, but it's hard to believe they make up 99.9% of healthcare discourse. Are people genuinely getting $100k in debt, or are they only telling the internet how much the total bill was and forgetting to add that their insurance picked up $94k of that.
  - projectileboy 3y ago
    I’m 51 and had this conversation too many times to indulge this. All I can say is that I wish you luck if you or your loved ones ever have a serious medical issue in the US. And you may be lucky. Or you may spend years on telephone calls trying to get a pharmacy benefits manager to send you the prescription your doctor prescribed. Or calls with your insurance company to get them to pay what they are supposed to pay.

kneebonian 3y ago

It seems that two very different but similar issues get lumped under the "healthcare" umbrella. 1. Is prescriptions people talk about how medicine is too expensive and they have to ration it. 2. The other problem is the surprise medical billing that people get hit with. that lasts forever and cripples them. These seems to be the.major complaints I hear about the healthcare system, and yet are 2 very different issues with different origins and solutions. Yet no one seems interested in solving the problems but instead just arguing (for and against) about universal healthcare or single payer healthcare or whatever the euphemism of the week is.

apayan 3y ago

http://archive.today/ozyyG http://archive.today/ozyyG

Jedd 3y ago

One of the handful of objectively positive things to come out of the COVID19 pandemic is a significantly increased awareness amongst many citizens of the USA just how uniquely awful their healthcare system (and to a lesser extent welfare system and award conditions) is/are. I'm sure the comparisons have been made for many years, but by mid-2020 it felt like almost everyone in the USA must have been exposed to some hard truths about how 'the rest of the west' handles these fairly fundamental services. As an Australian, and I suspect the Brits and others feel similarly, the pandemic also reminded us of what we stand to lose if we were to allow the eagerly nefarious agents to talk us out of (AU) Medicare or (UK) NHS, etc.

heavyset_go 3y ago
> I'm sure the comparisons have been made for many years, but by mid-2020 it felt like almost everyone in the USA must have been exposed to some hard truths about how 'the rest of the west' handles these fairly fundamental services. You'd hope, but that type of facts and rhetoric wasn't seized upon by the media or political parties. A good amount of people were never exposed to that information nor its consequences, let alone the consequences of our negligence towards health and social services. People were happy to get some checks and extended unemployment, and a lot of people were angry about those checks and extended unemployment. A good chunk of people wouldn't have given a shit about how well your country was doing if you were wearing masks.
- Jedd 3y ago
  Yeah, I suspect it's more nuanced than it seemed to me at the time. You say it wasn't seized upon by media etc, but perhaps it just wasn't by the media you (or I) was consuming? The USA media I consumed - Seth Meyer, John Oliver, some reddit / imgur - tends towards the more thoughtful / empathetic / liberal demographics, but unarguably is a bubble of sorts. I suspect, but also have no hard data, that the younger generation, generally more 'connected' and exposed to more of this type of information, was instrumental in extracting that orange chap, and I speculate much of that motivation came from this vector. Though how much of that was pandemic-highlighting of poor and unfair health services vs other factors .. well, who knows. Exit polls only get you so far, assuming these kinds of questions were ever asked.

pcurve 3y ago

"Ms. Blaido, a mechanic, said she racked up nearly $200,000 in bills from a two-week stay at Allina’s Mercy Hospital in 2009 for complications from pneumonia, along with several visits to the emergency department for asthma flare-ups. Ms. Blaido, a mother of four, said that most of the hospital stay was not covered by her health insurance" I'm confused. There is out of pocket maximum of $18,000 for a family that caps what patient has to pay for in a given year. That's the law. For ER room, you don't have to worry about out of network hospital.

sharts 3y ago

This is most people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIAFe7zaCRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIAFe7zaCRU No amount of medical intervention is going to fix terrible lifestyle choices and a culture that promotes them. There are a multitude of factors that go into making our lives decay to the point of needing medical treatment and those are things we should be focusing on. Doctors aren't miracle workers. Why is the CEO of McDonalds not required, by law, to eat Big Macs for 2/3s of his/her meals every day?

hellojesus 3y ago
You jest, surely. Someone offering a product or service is not forcing anyone to consume it. Should we force alcohol vendors to drink only alcohol?