People with health insurance may now represent the majority of debtors American hospitals struggle to collect from, according to medical billing analysts.
This marks a sea change from just a few years ago, when people with health insurance represented only about one in 10 bills hospitals considered “bad debt”, analysts said.
“We always used to consider bad debt, especially bad debt write-offs from a hospital perspective, those [patients] that have the ability to pay but don’t,” said Colleen Hall, senior vice-president for Kodiak Solutions, a billing, accounting and consulting firm that works closely with hospitals and performed the analysis.
“Now, it’s not as if these patients across the board are even able to pay, because [out-of-pocket costs are] such an astronomical amount related to what their general income might be.”
My understanding was that the plan was to baby step it in.
Start with getting everyone insured, then move on to patching things until the insurers are not part of it at all anymore, and it’s just the medicare paying for it all, and being able to negotiate prices, and directly hire doctors themselves and buy out hospitals. The end goal would be for healthcare to become a service like the post office, with every address serviced regardless of the cost.
That was the dream rather.
Democrats had about 90 days in 2009 to get it done, not knowing that it would just be 90 days.
That was the last Democratic super-majority, republicans then went hard into State legislatures in order to gerrymander the US so that a Democratic super majority of both houses could never happen again.
They also went hard on the racism, because the southern strategy worked the first time.