Quote:
Originally Posted by Tribesman
But since the Emergency Room is already paid for by the taxpayer and it already gets tax payers money specificly to pay for those who don't pay then how does that relate to his $2600 bill?
After all, how can they need to make up extra charges for those that don't pay when they are already getting paid for those that don't pay.
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They don't get money to pay for those who cannot pay. They eat the loss.
This is the thing, the government CLAIMS they are paying for all this health care, but they actually pay the providers BELOW COST.
Let's say the new law made 100% of the people on medicaid or medicare. Universal care, yipee!
The problem is that since they pay below the cost of delivery, the docs/hospital loses money the more patients they see. The more they see, the more they lose.
The only way to fix this is to make the government programs pay more, and then to reduce government cost, they need to ration care. Basically less aggressive care for terminal illness (where 90% of lifetime medical costs go).
The trouble is that US patients want the docs to throw everything but the kitchen sink at THEIR cancer, they only care about saving money when it's someone else. Course this expense buys us better care. The US death rate to common cancers as a function of incidence is FAR lower than europe (particularly the UK). (the deaths per 100,000 pop at large are basically identical, but the US incidence is about twice as high)
My wife treats everyone the same, BTW, not attention to insurance, etc. It sucks that for the great care she delivers, my family actually pays money out of pocket as charity to them, and we cannot even write it off.