Savings accounts? Are you ******* kidding me? Let me put this in perspective for you..... My mother was diagnosed with cancer in November 2002 and passed away in May 2003. In those 7 months she incurred over $800,000 dollars in total medical bills. She had insurance, but the 20% they didn't cover was over $150,000. Many days.... more than I care to recall in ICU at a cost of $7000 per day. Nothing will ever solve this problem unless something is done about the prices hospitals and doctors charge for their services.
Having worked in the Healthcare Industry for almost 20 years, I need to weigh in. Some of this may be repeats from past separate posts, so sorry in advance....
I personally believe in free market enterprise, and believe the government should not be sticking its nose into our personal lives. This includes healthcare.
With that said, the ACA was doomed from the jump. It was poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly executed, and currently poorly practiced.
The ACA is neither free market medicine, nor socialized medicine. It is a bastardized hybrid of the two, and was written with MASSIVE influence from the insurance companies and with lies upon lies about how great it was and was going to benefit all.
The democrats were in TOTAL control for Obama's first two years in office. They could have wrote and passed anything they wanted. Why didn't they pass universal socialized healthcare for all? Why not cover every single American? They steamrolled the ACA down everyone's throat without batting an eye? Why not go the full monty and put in 100% socialized medicine? Oh, that's right. Because you'd lose all your donations you get and will get from the insurance company's who lobby all of our elected crooks. Insurance premiums, copays, deductibles, coinsurance all rose, while the benefits of the plans has decreased. The major bell they were sounding was there was 52 million uninsured Americans, and the ACA would get them coverage. It did not. It only got 20 million. Yeah, that's a big number, and good for them. But I thought it was supposed to get ALL of those poor 52 million uninsured coverage?
The ACA also has many sections written into it that have nothing to do with healthcare, but everything to do with more government overreach. And before Trump signed the Executive Order that says the government would not collect any of the fines, we were all going to be screwed come 2018, as your employer would have been fined for you either taking the plan they offer through the company, or if you chose to take a plan offered through the Exchange. The only way they could have avoided a fine was to not offer insurance......the backdoor into 100% socialized medicine.
I currently work for a Hospital system. We have 11 hospitals, just shy of 1000 doctors, and many outpatient facilities and continuing care/pharmacies/etc. I have also worked for major insurance carrier, and also an insurance brokerage,
I can tell you from experience, there is a real problem with the cost of healthcare. No doubt about it. But it's not so easy to point a finger.
Someone above talked about physician malpractice insurance. I personally know doctors, friends not co-workers, but also co-workers too, that most of their malpractice premiums run them 40 - 60 percent of their income. This is why a 10 minute check up at your doctor's office is billed out to insurance at $125.00. You may only have a $20.00 copay, and then the insurance company and doctor already have a negotiated fee of $75.00. So insurance reimburses $55.00 and the doctor has to write off $50.00.
It because we have people in our society that eat deep fried mayonnaise balls for every meal and snacks, weigh 1000 pounds, is brought to a hospital because they were choking on the whole turkey they tried to eat, dies on the gurney because their heart and stomach simultaneously exploded, and the deceased's family decides to sue because the doctor and hospital didn't do enough to save them.
Insurance companies are who I point the biggest finger at......but we the people are partly to blame for their current condition. They are indeed greedy pigs, but we technically fed them. Healthcare insurance used to be just for catastrophic events. But then we got lazy and wanted to have coverage for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. Thus, insurance plans were written like this, and companies bought these "cadillac policies" to entice employees to come work for them.
But now there's abortions, and gender reassignment surgery, nose jobs, boob jobs, etc.
Our body, our choice, right?
Well then we should be using our own flippin' money and not everyone else's for our own healthcare, elective or necessary.
When a tornado destroys my home, or my car breaks down, or I want a new 70 inch TV, I don't visit my community and expect them to chip in or pay for all of it.
Lastly, going back to the poor unfortunate people who "can't afford to get sick" and racked up all these bills they can't pay for, or were turned away because they had insurance......these are the BIGGEST lies.
No doctor or hospital has EVER refused to treat a patient. And patients who truly can't afford massive bills have their balances written off and eaten by the doctors and hospitals. You'll need to fill out some forms, but it happens EVERY day. I know it does because it's part of what my department does on a daily basis. Millions of dollars monthly just written off, not recouped, nothing to show for it monetarily.......but patient is healthy and none the poorer.
