The clinic my partner once worked for would take 30% off the bill if you paid cash and choose to deal with your insurance company on your own (or just wanted to not involve Insurance)
The regulations and bullshit that InsCompanies make the medical facilities go through is insane. Add to that the additional layer of Government Regs (many are well meaning, but flawed) and it is no wonder so many rural healthcare providers are going under. Or operating in a “grey” area.
If the ACA is fully gutted, then there are going to be only a few outcomes if you are outside a major population center:
Regulations for health care facilities will be ignored even more and $Diety help you if you have to go to one of these places
Rural Healthcare will evaporate. Or replaced by the McHealthMart Conglomerate. Both are bad.
IIRC, those facilities love dealing with Medicare patients, because there’s one standardized list of coverage, one standardized price list, one standardized set of forms to fill out, one standardized process for submitting claims…
Not as profitable, surely, but just simpler in every way.
And all of the “healthcare” companies could switch from handling claims for themselves to handling Medicare claims instead. No jobs could be lost if done right. But they would really have to step up the investigation of fraud to keep the costs down.
The baby is born (yay “Pro-Life”) and then dies (yay getting rid of slackers and drains on the economy)!
I really had to fake my “patriotism” yesterday.
I would think a guaranteed money flow would be a good thing to these companies. But when your only goal is profit and nothing else, anything that might lessen that is viewed as evil and must be destroyed.
That is so far from the goal of the health industry…
… when your only goal is profit and nothing else, anything that might lessen that is viewed as evil and must be destroyed.
Got to first clarify the goals of our democracies. Believe me, USians are the canary here; they’re coming for your national health services and regulations too.
Then we fight the war against the rich when they try to stop democracy everywhere forever.
Then maybe there will be health care in rural Florida.
The purpose is to enrich those [Lord] has favored with riches, empower those [Lord] has favored with power, and punish those [Lord] has punished with poverty, ill health, or disability.
They may cite the “parable of the talents,” which refers to a returning tyrant, as describing the character of their [Lord].
There’s a famous quotation in the Bible, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to [be virtuous enough to] enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
I rather think that quote oversells the prevalence of virtue among the rich and powerful.
I used to work in a business office of a hospital, and for some billable tasks the hospital had to submit additional data. Often this would be diagnostic codes (example: run a suite of heart tests, include diagnostic code of angina).
There were other limits too. I remember there was an intersex person who had decided to have surgery for their preferred gender. Some of their claims were initially rejected because you can’t claim those tests for a person of that gender.
The hospital office had to get on the phone real fast with the government office before they tried to bill the person directly or something else stupid. Fortunately, once it was pointed out the government people agreed it was the fault of the business rules in their computer system and were happy to handle the claims manually, rather than risk insulting/traumatising the patient. It just meant we had to courier the forms in instead of submitting electronically.
Gee. Didn’t see that coming. Or any other man-baby reactions to not being taken up on the honor of being welcomed, Elan Muskie, as the magical honky on offer.
With his elite team of the rigid “rocket part”, a.k.a., a “tube”, which would have taken an elite team of ex-military guys endless fucking deadly hours to extract from the end-to-end jam it inevitably got into at some point over the weekend, Eddie Muskie, Jr. would usher in a new age of adventure-going boyish billionaire enforcing his mediocre “miracles in his own mind” on the meritless plebes at his feet.
I’m a little disappointed they didn’t just shoot him.
The worst part is, for all the hubris, the ego, the shitty worker treatment, the guy has done done good things. Powerwalls do work, and he shook the granola off electric cars and made them cool to people who are into cars.
But man, does he need a PR assistant. Or just somebody to stop him embarrassing himself in public.
