cut on my eye

Yes, he paid the bill. He didn't complain about paying. He complained about the amount. I'm paying the bill. I'm not complaining about having to pay $6500 for medical treatment when my max out of pocket is supposed to be $5000. I'm complaining that a four hour wait in a hospital and 5 minutes of a doctor's time is worth $6500 in the first place...I'm being gouged. Yes, you man up and pay your debts. But it doesn't mean you have to like it.
 
BroKen_H said:
...............

Just went through the same thing with my wife. Went to the doctor who said she needed a test at the hospital. Went to the hospital and they had us wait for 4 hours and then a doctor from the hospital looked at the note from the other doctor and said to go ahead and have the test run. She had the test done. The doctor charged us over $1000. The test was $4800 (after insurance). Hospital sent us another bill for other stuff. Total bill was well over $6k after insurance. For a test we could have scheduled, no emergency.
When I called the insurance carrier, they said that the treatment wasn't covered because it was Emergency Room. When we called the doctor and asked why he sent us to ER for a test that our insurance wouldn't cover (they SHOULD know), and was not an emergency, got the run around about needing the test done. Switched doctors. All in all, I agree with Mike about the new US healthcare system. Simply designed to make poor people poorer and middle class poor. The alternative IS to do it yourself, or just avoid doctors altogether, but we still HAVE to pay for ever more expensive insurance, whether we use it, need it or even want it...

..........
Click to expand...

Now on to the main part of your post...

That sucks.

There is an alternative but you lot are too deeply entrenched in the insurance and pharmaceutical economy. Here and elsewhere the care is free at the point of delivery and every one who earns pays in. It isn't perfect but it sure beats the crap out of expensive insurance cover that may r may not cover you. Here you get sick, you get treated. Mostly you get treated expertly, promptly and fairly, not always but mostly..
 
...and while we are on the subject of eyes, how did I miss the memo that all writing and labeling was going to be downsized and be illegible to everyone over the age of 20.:mad:

Happened a few years ago and no one bothered to tell me.:cursing:
 
And don't forget the ongoing battle with the comic strips in the papers...smaller and smaller...

I've also noticed that a 50 pound bag of dog food weighs a lot more than it did when I was 25. Also, my footprints are much deeper in the sand when I walk on the beach. Is gravity getting heavier?
 
...all that and some one has made the day shorter. Time itself is shrinking so gravity will inevitably be effected. All my summer cloths have shrunk over the winter as well. Explain that one...:mad:
 
I think that moths are getting smarter. When they eat out a part of my clothing that's stored, they mend it in a way that makes it look the same, but it's had a lot of material taken out and is therefore smaller. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. AFA time, I'm confused on that. Matthew 24:22 says that God would shorten the days or no flesh would be saved, but I seem to be saving up quite a bit of it...
 
It's funny that some people claim to understand and support capitalism but they don't comprehend how a fee for service business model is a conflict of interest as it pertains to healthcare, and they will fight to the death if anyone tries to change it in even the slightest way.

The only thing dumber than our refusal to change would be for the UK to be looking at what we've been doing and thinking "yes, let's be more like that." /facepalm
 
I was listening to NPR the other day and it was stated that one out of every four Americans is in debt to the American health care system. Don't know if it is true or not, but it doesn't sound unreasonable.
I have pretty good insurance. Had a hernia operation a few years ago and it cost me 40 dollars out of pocket. I hear many a horror story from coworkers who carry my employers insurance.
 
And there's the thing. It wasn't a couple of years ago. It is now. A couple of years ago, I had carpal tunnel and my out of pocket was under $100. I went in for my annual check up this year and my out of pocket was over $400...there's something seriously stinky about our new health care system. The old system was working well (at least if you used it), but now where EVERYONE must have insurance (or pay fines or be illegal, blah, blah) the costs at the doctor's offices have gone through the roof and the insurance companies are covering less.
Again, the conspiracy theorist nutcase in me says they are pushing socialized medicine on us and forcing it to look like a better deal, when what we HAD BEFORE was better.
Comment I most agree with in this thread was about the lawyers and the insurance companies being the ones getting rich off all this. Funny how this has turned out.
My two week stay at hospital in the early 60s raised a bill that my dad had to sell one of his rifles to pay for...Can you imagine what that rifle is worth today?
 
BroKen_H said:
And there's the thing. It wasn't a couple of years ago. It is now. A couple of years ago, I had carpal tunnel and my out of pocket was under $100. I went in for my annual check up this year and my out of pocket was over $400...there's something seriously stinky about our new health care system. The old system was working well (at least if you used it), but now where EVERYONE must have insurance (or pay fines or be illegal, blah, blah) the costs at the doctor's offices have gone through the roof and the insurance companies are covering less.
Again, the conspiracy theorist nutcase in me says they are pushing socialized medicine on us and forcing it to look like a better deal, when what we HAD BEFORE was better.
Comment I most agree with in this thread was about the lawyers and the insurance companies being the ones getting rich off all this. Funny how this has turned out.
My two week stay at hospital in the early 60s raised a bill that my dad had to sell one of his rifles to pay for...Can you imagine what that rifle is worth today?
Click to expand...

You're in the US? It's important to look at overall yearly costs (which people tend to forget) and not just out-of-pocket (which people tend to focus on because the bill is right in front of you and not buried in your employer system).

Annual healthcare costs for the average American have increased at a drastically slower rate than in the years prior to the ACA being passed. There is actually some logic to shifting to higher out of pocket: With low or zero deductibles people get all sorts of procedures and drugs they don't need. They don't experience those costs directly but it gets washed into your overall insurance bill. Everyone was doing it though, which made our insurance rates skyrocket. Thinking twice about "hey, do I actually need this?" vs "woohooo it's free drugs!" is actually a good thing relative to how far in the other direction we've gone. There are studies that show that American doctors are significantly more likely to recommend surgeries than in other healthcare systems that achieve better outcomes than ours does. This outcome in a fee for service system is not a coincidence. It's like asking the car dealership if they think your 2013 sedan is too old.

The other key to your post is the "at least if you used it" part. 1 in 6 Americans had no health insurance. And we're either the richest or top 7 richest country on Earth (depending if you look at overall GDP or per capita). 45 million people were living with a significantly increased risk of dying from preventable illness, and for what? We were paying the highest healthcare prices in the world by far. You and I were paying double what our friends in the UK and Australia pay. <---this is NOT an exaggeration. That truly was a national disgrace. No other wealthy industrialized nation would stoop to that level but us.

When it comes to healthcare, the US is uniquely stupid.
 
Yes. And comments like "significantly increased risk" make me want to puke...What a bunch of horse poo. Mindless.
 
You've missed the point entirely. The system did not used to cost that. A two week stay in the hospital cost the equivalent of a nice rifle in the 60s. Yeah, I can buy a nice (really nice) rifle for about $4000. But we're not even talking Beretta shotguns, we're talking a nice hunting rifle. Equivalent today, probably $800-1000. That was for two weeks of hospital care. Today it's more than twice that PER DAY, plus extras.. But emergency room stuff is outrageous.
Yeah, there may be people out there that abused the medical system, but you don't fix a problem by punishing everyone. Our current healthcare system is like incarcerating the entire population because some of them are murderers...
 
BroKen_H said:
You've missed the point entirely. The system did not used to cost that. A two week stay in the hospital cost the equivalent of a nice rifle in the 60s. Yeah, I can buy a nice (really nice) rifle for about $4000. But we're not even talking Beretta shotguns, we're talking a nice hunting rifle. Equivalent today, probably $800-1000. That was for two weeks of hospital care. Today it's more than twice that PER DAY, plus extras.. But emergency room stuff is outrageous.
Yeah, there may be people out there that abused the medical system, but you don't fix a problem by punishing everyone. Our current healthcare system is like incarcerating the entire population because some of them are murderers...
Click to expand...

I guess it all comes down to what your national priorities are. Here population health and until recently Education were considered primary and were placed at the top of the national aspiration as a way forward to collective prosperity. That is beginning to slip and it's not a good thing.

If we don't want our governments to prioritize collective national aims you have to ask exactly what it is that you want them to do...? Personally I am not comfortable with either a purely socialist or purely market economy driven model but less so for public services which should centre around health and education in my opinion.
 
Well, the top priority in the US seems to be military. I agree we need to be safe and we need to have our liberties defended, but if it's only to have them taken away by a legislative/judicial system what's the point?

And again, that is the point. If we make socialist medicine sound better than the system we HAVE, even if it wasn't better than the system we HAD, they've won the war...The US spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation on the earth. Doesn't mean we're healthier. Canada, UK and especially Oz are higher life expectancy. Obviously we're doing something wrong NOW. But I think that the problem was not insurance or socialized medicine as much as education. My dad rarely went to the doctor. He never went to the hospital Never. Thought the only reason to go to the hospital was to die (which is actually what happened, but he didn't go, they took him). If we could get people to stop seeing the doctor and the hospital as an adversary and as a ally, it would certainly help, but if every time you go, you have to take out a three year loan and end up on ANOTHER prescription, you'll never win that battle.

Your education system isn't so bad. It's still rated #5 on the Educate Every Child site (fairly unbiased) whereas we've fallen to #18.
 
Greg_L said:
For real. Who eats a christmas turkey that's full of shit?
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Nobody. It's an old saying. On the farm farmers raise their own turkeys. They have turkeys they harvest for thanksgiving and they have turkey they don't harvest until Christmas. The turkeys that are harvested in December have been fed and fattened up for an additional month....thus....they are more full of shit than the ones killed at Thanksgiving.
That's where the expression "full of shit as a Christmas turkey" came from.
I'm surprised you didn't know that, you being a southerner
 
If it's southern, why not "more full of shit than Christmas chitterlings"?
How about throwing the word "constipated" into the mix?
How about, "more full of shit than a constipated wine taster/art critic"? Either is pretty accurate.
 
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