The US Healthcare Mass Debate

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Scot Dutchy
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Scot Dutchy » Mon Jul 29, 2019 4:46 am

Here is an interesting vid from Stephen Fry over American Health Care and the NHS.

"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Tero » Wed Dec 18, 2019 5:21 pm

Image

LOUISVILLE, KY—Wondering if the woman had any idea how normal interactions like this are supposed to work, employees at Humana Insurance were becoming annoyed Wednesday with a customer who did not seem to realize that offers to pay for healthcare were just supposed to be a polite gesture. “Offering to cover 80% of surgery cost is just something you kind of say to make people feel better, nobody is actually supposed to follow through on that offer,” said case manager Raymond Carberry, who expressed frustration when a customer stepped completely outside the bounds of a normal, courteous interaction with her submission of a claim form for a broken arm. “Every non-crazy person knows how this works, they’re just supposed to pay us a premium and then move on. What kind of weirdo actually asks for money? It’s deranged. She even wants us to pay for her ambulance ride, that’s just something you throw on a contract because it’s expected, it doesn’t actually mean anything.” At press time, a relieved Carberry had noticed that the customer misspelled the name of the hospital and denied the claim in full.
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by pErvinalia » Thu Jan 09, 2020 9:23 am

. Image
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Tero » Tue Jan 21, 2020 5:41 pm

Doctors not opposed to Medicare for all
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4 ... culation=1
It may help get them paid, as denied claims will fall to smaller number.
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Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Joe » Wed Jan 22, 2020 12:14 am

Only one insurer to bill would be a major reduction in cost and improvement in claim quality where I work.
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Sat Jan 25, 2020 9:14 pm

Another item soon to be added to the list of 'accomplishments' of the Trump administration. I has been well understood for years that instituting a block grant system for Medicaid funding would result in a loss of coverage. Indeed, a well-worn piece of rhetoric in response to the idea is to pronounce something along the lines of 'more people will die.' It does seem possible that a decrease in access to health care would see an increase in poor outcomes, medically.

'Trump administration finalizing Medicaid block grant plan targeting Obamacare'
The Trump administration is finalizing a plan to let states convert a chunk of Medicaid funding to block grants, even as officials remain divided over how to sell the controversial change to the safety net health program.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma plans to issue a letter soon explaining how states could seek waivers to receive defined payments for adults covered by Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, according to seven people with knowledge of the closely guarded effort. An announcement is tentatively slated for the end of next week, more than one year after Verma and her team began developing the plan.

Capping Medicaid spending, even among just Obamacare's expansion population, would be a major transformation of how the federal government finances the safety net health care program that has grown to cover about 1 in 5 Americans. The plan is guaranteed to enrage critics and invite attacks from Democrats in an election year.

Republicans have long argued that states should receive defined funding for Medicaid, instead of the current open-ended structure in which the federal government matches state spending. Democrats, along with many hospital and physician groups, have fiercely opposed the idea, warning that strict funding constraints would result in cuts to enrollment and health care services.

Democratic lawmakers have promised to fight the administration on block grants, contending CMS doesn’t have the authority to restructure the program’s financing without congressional approval.

Even as Verma and her aides work to push through the block grant plan, Trump officials are still battling over its scope and how to best guard it from lawsuits the administration expects from Medicaid advocates. Even the terminology is in flux, as officials work to identify an alternative to the term “block grant,” which has negative connotations in the advocacy community. The plan still needs sign-off from health department lawyers.

...

The Trump administration is seeking to bypass congressional opposition by using existing Medicaid authority to test states' health care ideas under what's known as demonstration waivers.

Several Republican-led states are pursuing plans to convert their Medicaid programs into block-grant funding. Tennessee, which has not expanded Medicaid, in November became the first state to submit a block grant plan to the Trump administration. That plan remains under review, but three officials said the forthcoming guidance from CMS will not give Tennessee everything it's seeking.

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Tero » Thu Feb 13, 2020 1:29 am

https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Seabass » Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:13 pm

Behold, the horrors of American conservatism.


ProPublica wrote: When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested

Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.



ON THE LAST TUESDAY of July, Tres Biggs stepped into the courthouse in Coffeyville, Kansas, for medical debt collection day, a monthly ritual in this quiet city of 9,000, just over the Oklahoma border. He was one of 90 people who had been summoned, sued by the local hospital, or doctors, or an ambulance service over unpaid bills. Some wore eye patches and bandages; others limped to their seats by the wood-paneled walls. Biggs, who is 41, had to take a day off from work to be there. He knew from experience that if he didn’t show up, he could be put in jail.

Before the morning’s hearing, he listened as defendants traded stories. One woman recalled how, at four months pregnant, she had reported a money order scam to her local sheriff’s office only to discover that she had a warrant; she was arrested on the spot. A radiologist had sued her over a $230 bill, and she’d missed one hearing too many. Another woman said she watched, a decade ago, as a deputy came to the door for her diabetic aunt and took her to jail in her final years of life. Now here she was, dealing with her own debt, trying to head off the same fate.

Biggs, who is tall and broad-shouldered, with sun-scorched skin and bright hazel eyes, looked up as defendants talked, but he was embarrassed to say much. His court dates had begun after his son developed leukemia, and they’d picked up when his wife started having seizures. He, too, had been arrested because of medical debt. It had happened more than once.

Judge David Casement entered the courtroom, a black robe swaying over his cowboy boots and silversmithed belt buckle. He is a cattle rancher who was appointed a magistrate judge, though he’d never taken a course in law. Judges don’t need a law degree in Kansas, or many other states, to preside over cases like these. Casement asked the defendants to take an oath and confirmed that the newcomers confessed to their debt. A key purpose of the hearing, though, was for patients to face debt collectors. “They want to talk to you about trying to set up a payment plan, and after you talk with them, you are free to go,” he told the debtors. Then, he left the room.

The first collector of the day was also the most notorious: Michael Hassenplug, a private attorney representing doctors and ambulance services. Every three months, Hassenplug called the same nonpaying defendants to court to list what they earned and what they owned — to testify, quite often, to their poverty. It gave him a sense of his options: to set up a payment plan, to garnish wages or bank accounts, to put a lien on a property. It was called a “debtor’s exam.”

If a debtor missed an exam, the judge typically issued a citation of contempt, a charge for disobeying an order of the court, which in this case was to appear. If the debtor missed a hearing on contempt, Hassenplug would ask the judge for a bench warrant. As long as the defendant had been properly served, the judge’s answer was always yes. In practice, this system has made Hassenplug and other collectors the real arbiters of who gets arrested and who is shown mercy. If debtors can post bail, the judge almost always applies the money to the debt. Hassenplug, like any collector working on commission, gets a cut of the cash he brings in.

Across the country, thousands of people are jailed each year for failing to appear in court for unpaid bills, in arrangements set up much like this one. The practice spread in the wake of the recession as collectors found judges willing to use their broad powers of contempt to wield the threat of arrest. Judges have issued warrants for people who owe money to landlords and payday lenders, who never paid off furniture, or day care fees, or federal student loans. Some debtors who have been arrested owed as little as $28.

More than half of the debt in collections stems from medical care, which, unlike most other debt, is often taken on without a choice or an understanding of the costs. Since the Affordable Care Act of 2010, prices for medical services have ballooned; insurers have nearly tripled deductibles — the amount a person pays before their coverage kicks in — and raised premiums and copays, as well. As a result, tens of millions of people without adequate coverage are expected to pay larger portions of their rising bills.

The sickest patients are often the most indebted, and they’re not exempt from arrest. In Indiana, a cancer patient was hauled away from home in her pajamas in front of her three children; too weak to climb the stairs to the women’s area of the jail, she spent the night in a men’s mental health unit where an inmate smeared feces on the wall. In Utah, a man who had ignored orders to appear over an unpaid ambulance bill told friends he would rather die than go to jail; the day he was arrested, he snuck poison into the cell and ended his life.

In jurisdictions with lax laws and willing judges, jail is the logical endpoint of a system that has automated the steps from high bills to debt to court, and that has given collectors power that is often unchecked. I spent several weeks this summer in Coffeyville, reviewing court files, talking to dozens of patients and interviewing those who had sued them. Though the district does not track how many of these cases end in arrest, I found more than 30 warrants issued against medical debt defendants. At least 11 people were jailed in the past year alone.

With hardly any oversight, even by the presiding judge, collection attorneys have turned this courtroom into a government-sanctioned shakedown of the uninsured and underinsured, where the leverage is the debtors’ liberty.
full article:
https://features.propublica.org/medical ... le-kansas/



On the bright side, at least we don't have socialized medicine! :ddpan:
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by JimC » Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:19 pm

Truly horrific, and utterly uncivilised...
Nurse, where the fuck's my cardigan?
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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Scot Dutchy » Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:39 pm

It's America!
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Tero » Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:46 pm

I had to fight Medicare for 2 months on behalf of my mom, who did not know the tricks. They had called an ambulance for my dad and the wrong ambulance came. They were not "Medicare approved."

My dad died. Mom moved to Finland where it was easier to die.
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Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Scot Dutchy » Sun Nov 29, 2020 10:45 pm

Fuck Tero. Why do you live there?
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Tero » Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:39 pm

Scot Dutchy wrote:
Sun Nov 29, 2020 10:45 pm
Fuck Tero. Why do you live there?
By the time I was done with college, I had entered industry in my field. I actually had an interview in Sweden half way thru my career. They took a Polish guy instead. The research place closed down 10 years later and the jobs moved to UK.

It's a bit late now. I'll have grandkids here some day.

If I'd trained in Finland I'd be in the paper industry or a high school teacher.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by Scot Dutchy » Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:43 pm

Sweden would have been a better alternative. Anything better than the US.
"Wat is het een gezellig boel hier".

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Re: The US Healthcare Mass Debate

Post by laklak » Mon Nov 30, 2020 12:17 am

#eswatini.

Just sayin.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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