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.”
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- 1.6 Trillion dollar market
- Middle man that creates more work for the patient and the doctor than if it didn’t exist
- Capitalist solution for an inelastic demand
- Unable to see prices ahead of services
- checks notes You can’t change insurance provider unless you change jobs
This is an idiotic system that was never going to work for anyone but puppet master pulling the strings.
Very cool, normal, high-functioning healthcare system. Such free market efficiency. I’m so glad we fuck everyone to death so that rich people the world over can get top-notch healthcare at, like, two very specific private hospitals. No way we could achieve that without fucking everyone to death, no sir. God bless America.
Our healthcare system is completely fucking broken.
Insurance is mostly a discount program against destructively unaffordable services.
I have found private health providers for things like physical therapy often completely refuse insurance at all because medical billing is more expensive and troublesome than directly charging the clients. The demand is high enough they’re stil too busy with the clients that can afford no insurance.
Insurance in any way being a more expensive option than not having it at all is insane but our reality.
A lot of dentists also take this approach. Our dentists takes no insurance whatsoever. They were saying at the conferences they attend more and more of their peers are doing the same thing.
Angers me to think the end result is that this is the norm and employers no longer offer dental coverage at all, putting the full burden of that cost entirely on the individual.
I mean…
Thanks Obama?
I get it. We’re never supposed to criticize democrats.
But it sure does seem that at every opportunity to go hard, they as a team, simply don’t.
Obama could have made single payer a priority. He could have made codifying RvW a priority. He could have made lots of things priorities, but he didn’t. He made compromise his priority as if they were ever going to give him an inch. The only thing truly progressive about him was his marketing.
Not going full stop into your priorities has consequences. This is one of them.
The counterargument is always that the democrats don’t have the votes, so they shouldn’t try. Democratic strategy has put us into a ratcheting crab walk towards fascism and totalitarianism. This happens as a function of ‘compromise’ and as a function of the insistence we run ‘safe’ candidates, when realistically, you aren’t capturing any centrist voters on a D ticket, ever, and haven’t been since before they year 2000.
We need to kick the blue dogs out of the party and run leftists down ticket in ever race. We can’t have spoilers taking D seats. They aren’t D’s but we’re not giving the people of those places any other options. Let those blue dogs run as Republicans. They won’t win. They’re too moderate. Crab-walking the Democratic party further and further right trying to cater to a non-existent center is a major factor for why things are continually getting worse.
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.
I’d take Obama any day over the alternative, but the fact that he’s heralded as one of the greatest after authorizing the murder of an American citizen without due process is pretty remarkable. His presidency was marked with failure, but he’s a charismatic media darling, and the liberals eat it up just like the right.
When you campaign on hope and change only to deliver more of the same and champion the status quo you pave the way for shitheels like trump.
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Bernies healthcare plans were crazy unrealistic, and based on rogue states such as France, The UK, or Denmark. Luckily we dodged that bullet and got a sensible moderate who *checks notes* supports ethnic cleansing.
Yeah not gonna be surprised when Trump wins this one, I see no positive case for Biden being put out there.
