Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
That's the part I don't get.
Does the Federal govt. take our taxes and pay privately owned hospitals for the bills that some people can't pay? I've never heard of that.
But I keep seeing that same argument made that we all are somehow paying for people who didn't pay their hospital bill.
My argument is...if the Federal govt. would stop holding hands with the medical industry and allowing them to price gouge us, we wouldn't NEED insurance (except for catastrophe)
We never needed to have insurance before. I was born in the 1960's. Became an adult in the late 1970's.
Was a young man in the 1980's.
Trust me, if you are my age or older...you know damn well that this is a big ripoff. $50 for a dixie paper cup to drink water in the hospital?
CM had her appendix removed in 2011. That cost over $20,000 !!!!! And she didn't even stay overnight in the hospital.
In 1985 I had a stepson with my first wife. He had his appendix removed, but it had ruptured all the way. 3 day hospital stay in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla
Total cost? $3,500
We paid it out of pocket.
"Healthcare" should have been about tort reform, breaking the deal that the govt. made with Big Pharma, and starting Congressional investigations into the shady world of hospital billing and insurance company scams.
|
Robbie yes, when a hospital has a bad debt the government bails them out for a portion of it
random link, may not be the best:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/...-save-b/nT6Qj/
it may just deal w/ medicare
Quote:
Hospitals aren?t leaning hard enough on Medicare beneficiaries to pay their share of medical costs, according to a recent report. It suggests reducing what the government pays to cover such bad debt, which could pressure hospitals to bill more aggressively.
This approach could save Medicare nearly $36 billion in the next decade, the report estimates.
The federal government spends millions of dollars each year reimbursing local hospitals for uncollected deductibles and coinsurance not paid by Medicare beneficiaries, a practice that private insurance companies do not follow.
The report by the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General says this encourages hospitals to bill Medicare instead of trying to collect from patients.
But hospital officials say they are aggressive while still losing money on every fully funded Medicare patient they treat, forcing them to shift costs to private payers.
Last year, Medicare reimbursed hospitals 70 percent of the amount they could not collect from patients, called ?bad debt.? Recently passed health care reforms reduce rate this to 65 percent. But the report, released in December, suggests slashing it to 25 percent.
|