Healthcare for the Rich only.

[Leftist]

Depressing read. The healthcare system here is a travesty.

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.

......

Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.

About a week later, Stephanie had to ask her mother for $35,000 more so Sean could begin the treatment the doctors had decided was urgent. His condition had worsened rapidly since he had arrived in Houston. He was “sweating and shaking with chills and pains,” Stephanie recalls. “He had a large mass in his chest that was … growing. He was panicked.”

Nonetheless, Sean was held for about 90 minutes in a reception area, she says, because the hospital could not confirm that the check had cleared. Sean was allowed to see the doctor only after he advanced MD Anderson $7,500 from his credit card. The hospital says there was nothing unusual about how Sean was kept waiting. According to MD Anderson communications manager Julie Penne, “Asking for advance payment for services is a common, if unfortunate, situation that confronts hospitals all over the United States.”

The total cost, in advance, for Sean to get his treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy was $83,900.

You don't have money? No problem, it's ok, we understand. Iska dhimo.

Why exactly are the bills so high?

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

http://www.healthland.time.com/2013/02/ ... illing-us/

[Basra-]

Leftist


U r NOT falling for this are YOU? The Obama machine is ready to implement the Obama care, so there, the underground working is in working here.


PS: You don't have to pay all that money---Medicaid will take care of u if u cant pay for it. And besides, if they accepted death and let it go--they might have been naturally cured by God, but no, they had to control it with big checks. Sometimes embracing death is beautiful.



PS: OH, hi there leftist....

[Talo alle udaa]

There is so much misinformation about exactly why the cost of healthcare is so high in the U.S.

One reason everyone seems to look over is simply the cost of making new drugs. Each potential drug has to go through ridiculous amount of trials, and randomization before it even reaches the market. So by the time Joe needs his chemo, the companies making the drug are trying to regain all the investment they made on the drug-largely due to the american public's demand for safe drugs.

The equipment is expensive, the drugs are expensive, and the doctors go through ridiculously expensive schooling in addition to malpractice insurance in the thousands.

Those who think healthcare is expensive because doctors get paid too much are ignorant, lazy, and over simplifying matters.

[CushiticReflections]

Leftist


U r NOT falling for this are YOU? The Obama machine is ready to implement the Obama care, so there, the underground working is in working here.


PS: You don't have to pay all that money---Medicaid will take care of u if u cant pay for it. And besides, if they accepted death and let it go--they might have been naturally cured by God, but no, they had to control it with big checks. Sometimes embracing death is beautiful.



PS: OH, hi there leftist....

I live in a country with free healthcare. I'm always perplexed by the willingness of people to allow a system to continue to exist where the availability of healthcare depends entirely upon the amount of money that they possess. The thought alone is sickening. I know people from challenging backgrounds - some were single mothers, one had more than one child under the age of seven with illnesses or disabilities who frequented the hospital, going to the emergency multiple times a week. They could barely afford food and to imagine the costs of the healthcare and special care for her children would cripple her family for decades.

There is no agenda behind universal healthcare. Just the idea of equal rights and equal opportunities to health, education, and overall well-being to all - regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, education, and socio-economic class.

[Titanium]

Free medical care

The only thing I was charged for was a $10 fine for not reporting an appointment cancellation but I fought it off and told them I was a poor student. Luckily one of the other receptionists was a Somali lady and she ordered the white lady to take off the charge

I even got my prescriptions for free. Doctor's cabinet is filled with drugs, mostly generics. You can only get away with this with your family physician, not walk-ins.

People who pay for their medical care are dumb. There should be riots in the streets

But I still tax evade

[Titanium]

Why do they provide free medical care for Guantanamo Bay prisoners but not regular folk

[salool]

Caafimadku waa waxa ugu qaalisan ee qofku haysto, sadly som diseases cant be treated even if you've the money.

[Lillaahiya]

Stay losing, Yanks. The Canadian government spends less per person on health care and it's still universal.

[grandpakhalif]

Stay losing, Yanks. The Canadian government spends less per person on health care and it's still universal.

Thank God for the Canada Health Act If I were to get cancer wal ciyaadubillah I would be treated free of charge

[Basra-]

grandpa

u r NOT in Canada. U r in the UK. They also have free health care.

[Leftist]

^^ Obamacare is a major improvement, but it doesn't solve the runaway costs which might very well doom the program in 20 years time. Not to mention, it brings 30 million new customers to the Healthcare mafia clique.

The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington

You only get medicaid if you're on welfare or have kids among other eligibility restrictions.

Free socialized medicine is the solution. But billions of dollars in lobbying will make sure that never happens.

[Leftist]

Talo,

All the points you raised were demolished in the article with real-life examples.

-Drugs are actually very cheap. Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, however, are insatiably greedy and charge the poorest patients cost+ multiple times over.

-Equipment too is also very cheap. It's expensive for the same reasons: Hospitals charge them out to patients at outrageous rates. Rich folk pay out of pocket without blinking; however, the middle-class and upper-middle class, even with very good insurance, are one illness away from bankruptcy.

-Doctors aren't the main villains here; Hospital exec/admin, pharmaceutical exec, and lobbyists are. But since you brought it up, medical education is a racket; they tightly control and restrict the number of med schools and med-student numbers creating an artificial crisis of doctor shortages...which results in high salaries for all. Win-win for them, not so much for the taxpayer and whoever is unfortunate enough to get sick with no insurance, or even with insurance once you hit that limit.

- Malpractice insurance does need to be reformed, but it's a tiny fraction of operating costs compared to the torrent of money flowing in

- "years spent in med school, sacrifices, etc" = whining. Wanna get rich? become a soulless IB banker. There are plenty of smart, industrious students who want to become physicians for the right reasons and who would be perfectly content with 75k a year. "Yeah, I went went to school for 13 years, took out loans to finance a contrived lifestyle, so now you've gotta pay me 500k a year so that I can pay my loans back " Psshhh.

Read the article in full, sxb. What you wrote is lobbyist sheeko. Healthcare is so damn expensive because greedy 'captains of industry' applied the principles of usurious profit-making to what claims to be a non-profit industry: healthcare

[Leftist]

One night last summer at her home near Stamford, Conn., a 64-year-old former sales clerk whom I’ll call Janice S. felt chest pains. She was taken four miles by ambulance to the emergency room at Stamford Hospital, officially a nonprofit institution. After about three hours of tests and some brief encounters with a doctor, she was told she had indigestion and sent home. That was the good news.

The bad news was the bill: $995 for the ambulance ride, $3,000 for the doctors and $17,000 for the hospital — in sum, $21,000 for a false alarm.

21k for laabjeex Get money.

[Leftist]

[youtube]?v=3Jo9JylVN3A[/youtube]

[afisoone]

These people want to leave 10, 000 years. Remember the atheist who died last year. He paid $5million dollar and the medication they gave him expedites his death. The guy was there the cancer medical center for 7 weeks. His name was Christopher Hitchens.