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Posted by Hope on September 13, 2009, 4:54 pm, in reply to "Re: I wish someone could explain"
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I think what we're now seeing here in the housing insurance industry is what we'll be seeing in the health insurance industry soon.
Certainly, a percentage of folks blithely go to the ER and then rip up their bills. But a majority will wait until they're near death if they're uninsured. They'll still get the level of care, supposedly, that their insured brethren will receive (if their insurance okays it) but they'll be stuck with impossible bills.
The technology is great here, absolutely. But how many times have we seen hospital or doc bills go up when they've bought new equipment, so they could have the 'latest technology' and be competitive?
Examples: My out of pocket to survive breast cancer (not including the recon) was $12,000 and I was insured. That was 9 years ago or so and I remember reading an article in Time around then about the disparate ways women were treated when they had bc depending on if they were insured or not. They claimed that women who weren't insured and were advanced stage (stage 2 maybe) were going to die based on combinations of lack of education, lack of affordable resources, holding off to see the doc despite symptoms (education and lack of resources again), ignorance of symptoms, etc. I saw that with a couple of clients. How they were treated by the docs, the tests offered, etc, were not on the same level as those ladies who were insured. And it was clear that the docs didn't like it any betta than I did but they couldn't in all conscience drive these women into the ground with bills and stress when a mammo and ultrasound would (maybe) do the job diagnostically as opposed to an MRI or PET scan that might find seeding elsewhere.
My recent surgery this past year to replace the disc in my neck and give me back the use of my hands (thank goodness we can do that now).....before insurance, the cost was $50,000. Twenty of that was simply for the small piece of cadaver bone they used to replace the disc. Jes for that. The rest of it was six hours of being there.....pre-, during and post-op. I will not spend a night in any hospital anymo. Eva. Too expensive and too risky, health-wise. We come out sicker sometimes than we go in. My outta pocket was around $5,000 for the hospital and another $1200 for anesthesia and then the doc's bill as well so it was running close to 9 grand. And that's with insurance that we're paying more and more for every year.
Meantime, my house insurance doubled from $900 to almost $2000, flood insurance rose from $300 to $1200 and I have to pay the state wind/hail program $3600. The insurance companies are charging 600% markups for a year or two, then dropping their clients as they slowly pull out of the business of property insurance, like they'll pull out of health insurance too. Yet, we're required to have insurance if we have a mortgage. We're required to have health insurance if we want to prolong our lives with well checks, yearly mammos, all the things that we need to do to stay healthy and not drain our brethren who also have health insurance.
No one can survive like this. I know we're the Third Coast down here, almost a third world country but if the rest of the nation doesn't wake up to the fact that they're next on the insurance companies' plan of getting out of insurance and going into banking, it's gonna be worse than this soon and woe unto all of us.
I hate to be dire and I'm sorry to say this but believe me, if we don't regulate what's going on, if we don't get this under control somehow, we will lose our status as the First Nation of Medicine. We're close right now......India wised up years ago, started taking over our own medical transcription companies until they really had their teeth in that industry, then used that moeny to sprinboard and educate their people, sunk a ton of money into beautiful, clean new clinics and offered the world plastic surgery at a quarter of what the U.S. charged. Bam, India is becoming a force to be reckoned with.
Our politicians are too busy holding grudges on both sides to get the damned job done that we hired them for.
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