Random Politics & Religion #37: W/ Bubba The Love Sponge

36 trillion dollars...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-30/study-medicare-for-all-bill-estimated-at-32-6-trillion

You don't have to be a math major to understand America can't really afford a 36 trillion dollar expenditure.

I mean 32 but still.

we already do pay for all that stuff but instead of healthcare, schools, police, fire departments, and infrastructure, our tax dollars go to corporations intermingled into our government using warfare as their vehicle.

We can afford that if 32 million Americans write best-selling books! Easy peasy!

You're starting to sound like Lordgrim. Never go full Lordgrim.

Yes taxes pay for a lot of things but your local police department doesn't cost trillions of dollars.

The revenue required for free health care would require a very high tax that most people wouldn't want to pay for.

Imagine a house in your neighborhood burns down, and you had nothing to do with it. Your spiteful neighbor insists you burned it down while having no evidence that you did it. She screams so insidiously and so often that the cops agree to investigate you for the crime of arson. They investigate you for two years and all the while you're proclaiming publicly that you're innocent. After the investigation ends, it turns out that no one in fact burned down the house, it was struck by lightning. Meanwhile your hateful neighbor insists that you should still goto jail because you obstructed the investigation into a hoax by proclaiming your innocence.

This is where the left is at.

wouldn’t need to pay more taxes if the misappropriation of taxes was brought an end

Nadler has just requested Barr to BREAK THE LAW by releasing the full unredacted report.

That's the exact opposite of capitalism....

....

Not like you'd understand Mr ISIS.

Do you even meet the koalafications to make that assessment?

As a veteran, and as any vet you can ever talk to will tell you is socialized medicine sucks ***.

Ask a vet about va wait times and ***poor service. I just had to make a appointment with ortho for my knee again (broke femur, tib/fib and shattered kneecap in service) because I am having bad pain with walking. They gave me more 800mg ibuprofen and scheduled me a appointment for May 30th.... I can barely climb stairs it hurts so much, *** I been sleeping on the couch.

Think of how many vets vs how many citizens there are. Is that what you want for you and your family?

Obviously we would hopefully not be using some ***system like we have tried in the past/currently. something needs to change though. it should not cost 500$ for me to speak to a dr for 5 minutes just to get the go ahead to get a 15$ bottle of antibiotics i needed to clear up my streptococcus that, for me, never clears on its own and always develops into severe pneumonia. which by the way, can quickly end your life.

he never ran a test on me. all he did was shine a flashlight in my mouth and ear and then write a prescription.

he actually wrote me 3 prescriptions

They don't believe you and/or they don't want to accept the reality that their belief in the "everything should be free" fantasy is wrong.

affordable healthcare and living wage that covers all basic necessities =/= everything should be free

and btw, of the 3 prescription the dr wrote, only one was affordable after the visit (the antibiotic).

Hail comrade, glory the mother nation.

That is a big reason healthcare costs so much here in the states, practically everything requires the personal care and signature of someone who spent a stupid amount of money and a very long time on a doctorate.


Empowering other medical professionals to do stuff and allowing clinics to perform routing low danger treatments dramatically lowers the cost.

$500? Are you going to the ER to be seen for strep throat? There are minute clinics and doctors cares around here that will see you, test you, and give you a prescription for $100 without insurance. It'll only cost your copay if you have insurance.

no, i made an appointment.

Maybe it’s more expensive because i live in Washington state?

It's based on your health insurance and the going rates. Medical services typically have billing rates in excess of 100% what actually gets paid. Insurance companies typically negotiate rates that are half the billing rate and call it a "discount" on the EoB you get. Also there is a huge difference between HDCP and a PPO with the HDCP being better in the long run for most people.

Of course going in with "no insurance" means they stick you with the inflated rate knowing full well you can't pay it. They need to keep that rate because it's how the charge medicare so much.

The current cost of health care in America is already trillions of dollars.

There is a health care tax but it is free market! It goes to corporations and their executives, not the government!

But hey, the death panels are free market so the corporations win!!!

And we all lose.

And just think how much we will save under McConnell's medicare for none plan!

Nopes.

Here in WA we have better medical coverage than most states.

Or maybe it just looks that way to me because I am old enough for medicare.

PM me.

Actually it doesn't, not in the way you think so anyhow.

See there are no super big evil corporations getting all this money, that would make them FAR to big of a target for laws, regulations and reforms. Instead there are tens of thousands of smaller entities getting all that healthcare money, and because the largess is spread out, and the relationships so convoluted, nobody can untangle it to reduce actual costs. In fact nobody actually knows the "real" costs of healthcare, just the inflated paper costs that are ignored wholesale. The people with the most knowledge are the insurance companies and only because they have to negotiate all these discounts and contracts with everyone involved. Those insurance companies are financially advantaged to keeping that knowledge secret in the same way Google keeps the details on it's metric gathering secret.

So here is a eye doctors appointment I had for a checkup.

Billed Cost was $120 USD
Deductible: $58.75 USD
Insurance Discount: $61.25 USD
Insurance Paid: $0
Provider May Bill: $0

So yeah, the insurance company paid exactly $0 for my eye appointment, I paid an upfront deductible that the doctors office charges, and the rest was completely ignored and vanished into thin air.

Last year my wife had some routing labs done.

Billed Cost was $267 USD
Deductible: $0
Insurance Discount: $237.31 (I'm not joking)
Insurance Paid: $29.69
Provider May Bill: $0

Yeah digest that for a second, paper cost was $267, actual cost was $26.69, or less then 10% of the billed cost.

Now my wife has to periodically visit an endocrinologist due to her being a cancer survivor (long story).

Bill cost was $325.00 USD
Deductible: $0
Insurance Discount: $124.23
Insurance Paid: $200.77
Provider May Bill: $0

Awhile back my wife had to have an endoscopy and the bills were exactly like the above, on paper somewhere around $15,000 USD, but in actuality we only had to pay about $1100 USD and the insurance paid like $5K. The anesthesiologist billed over $5K, the insurance covered 500 USD and told us we would have to pay the difference. The anesthesiologist didn't bill us and three months later we contacted his office to inquire if a bill was due, they told us not to expect one as they weren't billing us the difference. When we asked about that we were told it's a common practice to bill large standard numbers but accept less due to medicare's price being based on those numbers.

Yes it's medicare that's causing all these issues. The billed rates is used as part of the medicare payout formula which takes into account national, region and provider averages, the higher the billed amount the higher medicare will pay. Insurance companies know this and keep their own allowable price list.

If we were to ask the doctor "how much will this procedure cost", they wouldn't have a clue and couldn't even give a ballpark estimate. Now I know all these numbers because I have a High Deductible Care Plan and they are required by law to provide me with something called an Explanation of Benefits (EoB) which details out the individual costing codes and the money involved. They take some research to figure out what they mean but it's gives a real view into the healthcare costs. Because I'm on a HDCP I can choose whatever care provided I want, my insurance company will only pay a certain amount and the rest is paid out of the HSA me and my employer contribute to. Those on a PPO won't get these details, they just pay fixed deductible per visit, though in reality they are paying for it with their insurance premiums.

Anyhow long post but wanted to explain some of the finer details of our healthcare system. It's deeply broke because of medicare and everyone involved in it using Hollywood accounting to create fictitious bills and costs.