plix (imported) wrote: Wed Apr 30, 2008 5:32 pm
I don't know of any doctor who would not agree that a cash patient beats an insurance patient any day. I feel that allowing these mega corporations we call insurance companies to control healthcare in this country is what the problem with our healthcare system is.
Today we rely completely on these corporations to pay for our healthcare. Have a cough and need to see the doctor for a simple $50 visit? Pull out that insurance card and let them pay for it. Never mind the fact that with them paying for it, they will say what happens with their money. They decide what treatment you will and will not get, what conditions you do and do not have, and how much or little time you will spend with the doctor they are paying for.
What puzzles me is that people are surprised when for profit corporations act like for profit corporations. They can't seem to understand that insurance companies are in business for the same reason as any other company - to make a profit. They get confused and angry when they are denied services. They seem to think that insurance companies are in business to pay for everything all of their clients ask for and run themselves out of business. They don't understand when insurance companies want to cut costs and increase profits. Perhaps a business 101 course is in order for these people.
I have
the hospital bill from my wife's birth in the late 1940s. The total bill for the hospital stay, including the delivery, but not including the doctor's bill was $105.00 And, it wasn't a "drive-thru delivery" in those days. At the time, my father-in-law worked for a railroad and made $55.00 a week, about the average salary for the typical American worker at the time. So the hospital stay for the delivery was about two weeks pay. The doctor's bill was a similar amount so the delivery cost about a month's pay for an average American worker.
In those days, most hospitals were non-profit corporations and doctors, while comfortably upper middle class, did not expect to be multi-millionaires (in 1940s money). Since the advent of third-party payment from profit oriented insurance companies and HMOs medical costs have risen far faster than the rate of inflation. It costs far more than one month's pay for the average worker to have a baby in a hospital. The medical establishment's excuse that costs have risen because there is so much more technology involved in medical care today does not ring true when you see your itemized hospital bill includes things like charging five dollars for a Kleenex tissue or an aspirin tablet. This has all been brought about by third-party payment and the profit motive.
Just to give you an idea of how bad it really is, there is a computer program that is used by hospitals when submitting billing to insurance companies that "optimizes" the bill. What it does is to go through the bill checking the procedure codes that the payments are based on. It compares the procedure codes with any other codes that could be considered almost the same thing, i.e. the substitution would not be noticed by the claims department, and if any other code that may be "legitimately" used is more expensive, that code is substituted for the original one. Hospitals have used this since the 1980's.
Consider your premium for medical insurance. If you paid that into a savings account for catastrophic illness and paid for the routine doctor visits and checkups out-of-pocket, how much money would the average person have saved up by the time they needed it? Consider that none of this payment would go to agent commissions or insurance company profit. My family has (too) many pets and have used this approach to self-insure for veterinary bills with notable success. Of course, the premiums for pet insurance are much smaller than medical insurance and few people in this country have the discipline to put that much money away, at all, every month let alone reserved for a specific purpose, but it can be done.
The entire system of providing medical care in this country needs an overhaul. In the mean time, your best course of action is to take as good care of yourself as you can and, assuming you remain employed, start a medical savings account of your own.
