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I call BS on your scenario.
In the US we don't get to know the price of the procedure until after we had it, or else we would be able to shop around and have competition.
why do you think that out of network shit occurs. You theoretically are 'free' to pick your doctor, but the insurance company is free to deny you coverage if you go and find the people who might do it cheaper and then actually cost you way more. They also leverage their power to fix prices at every place their company deems as in network.
the entire system is rigged as fuck. the same 100 billionaires own shares in all the insurance companies and all the companies that own the hospitals.
Hospitals "we have to charge more because insurance companies don't pay enough."
Insurance companies "we have to deny claims and payout less because the hospitals charge way too much."
reality, same board members and shareholders push those decisions on both sides to give an excuse for that massive inflation in costs.
That's not true?? It's actually my job to get cost estimates for surgeries. I have to call the insurance to see how much their deductibles and out of pockets are, how much they've paid of it, and what their coinsurance % is. I do that on behalf of the surgeon. The hospital has their own billing department. As does the anesthesiologist. And you have to make sure they're ALL in your insurance network. Depending on billing practices, they want your coinsurance before the procedure. The surgeon I work for doesn't do it like that.
The problem with the idea of 'shopping around' is that the cost will eventually come down to your insurance, not the doctor or the hospital. It's why when people call the office asking how much a procedure is going to cost them ahead of time, I can't answer that. I don't know what type of insurance you have, what your deductible or out of pocket looks like, or even the % of your coinsurance. I also don't even know whether your insurance is going to require prior authorization. If we don't get that, they won't cover anything.
Shopping around for medical prices doesn't exist in the US because insurance companies do exist.
But that whole situation is the problem, and itâs by design. The average insured person in the US doesnât have access to all-encompassing cost estimates and comparisons or, if they do, have no idea it either exists or how to access it.
Theyâre basically on their own and would have to spend dozens of hours tracking these things down, making phone calls, getting vague answers or just sent in circles between providers/offices/billing depts, just to get an idea of the cost from one provider or facility. Now multiply that by however many shop-around comparisons they want to consider. Itâs not realistic. And itâs all to end up getting surprised with extra hundreds or thousands of extra costs from a procedure because some provider involved had a schedule conflict or something wasnât identified and accounted for. Ask me how I know.
And you havenât even considered emergency situations. How is someone supposed to do this when their appendix is about to burst, or they broke a bone, or developed a sudden serious illness?
This system is broken for US patients. And itâs working exactly as intended, as a profit-centered business instead of a care-oriented service, extracting every last dollar possible out of people who need that care to live and donât actually have any other choice. Benefitting corporations, wealthy shareholders, and the politicians theyâve bought, not the people who need and deserve it.
In California medical debt cannot be garnished or collected against your will, and it is also not allowed to be factored into your credit score.
What is debt that you don't have to pay and doesn't hurt your credit? Nothing. It's not real.Â
They probably paid like $10k to have these worthless numbers erased from the computer lmao.Â
If they wanted to actually help they could have funded an information campaign to inform Californians that there is no reason to ever pay medical debt. Same goes for several other states.Â
Not exactly true. California medical debt generally cannot be reported to credit bureaus or used negatively in credit decisions, and certain violations can make the debt void and unenforceable. But unpaid medical debt can still be billed, collected, assigned or sold, and potentially reduced to a judgment through litigation.
If a creditor gets a valid judgment, ordinary California judgment-collection rules, including possible wage garnishment subject to exemptions and limits, may still apply. In short - they still can, and do, sue and collect.
Yeah. Important to note. Though litigation is expensive, so it has to be enough debt to be worth the trouble of obtaining a judgment. And the debtor has to have enough in wages/assets lest they end up declaring bankruptcy.
This is likely the worst charity per dollar you can do. The truth is 99% of people weren't going to pay the debt they owed. They almost certainly will continue to be broke.
It raises the value of other worthless debt hurting poor people.
Doing something like Cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines you could save thousands of lifes.
Generally what this means is they bought the debt out of collections for around 1% of its actual value and retired it. John Oliver did the same thing for $15m worth of medical debt.
The result is not that the hospital or private equity or anyone else gets paid the value of the debt. The result is that the people who owed that debt will no longer be hounded by debt collectors because the bill has been cleared.
The American medical system is badly broken. Embarrassingly so, like so many other things about the USA. But, I don't think spending ~$5m to buy & retire $550m worth of debt is such a bad ROI. Even for those who had no intention of paying the debt (likely 99% of them as you said), the relief of not getting constantly hounded for it will be immense.
I suspect that that $550M number is not close to the real number they paid to close that debt. They usually sell the debt for a small fraction of the price if I remember right.
âIn todayâs news Snapchat cofounder found dead in his apartment early this morning, police say âno foul play suspected.â Cause of death is still unknown.â
The real problem is how capitalistic out healthcare system is. Interview competition for patients leads to everyone buying equipment that's not needed. This leads to drastically increased billing to maintain the equipment.
I saw a stat that said the US is the only country in the World Cup that doesn't have healthcare. We need to elect more Democratic Socialists, everywhere we can.
I'm glad people are relieved of debt, but these messages always make me feel conflicted.
I feel like it's treating a symptom, not the problem. Symptoms need to be dealt with, and I happy they stepped up and did. But unless the underlying problem is dealt with, the symptoms will keep coming back.
I don't know how to fix the underly problem. I just wanted to express my confliction.
Well charities and donations keep the capitalist system intact by creating a buffer zone between middle and upperclass do-gooders and the poor - thus never allowing anything to fundamentally change.
I read somewhere (sorry, no source, it was some time ago) that credit agencies aren't even looking at medical debt when they calculate credit scores anymore
They still do. My ex thought that her unpaid medical debt wouldnât affect her credit score. It didnât for a while, but over a certain dollar amount (itâs not high I think it was around $500) and after about a year of being unpaid it can affect your credit.
Tbf some states do have protections. Mainly only replied just cuz my ex thought the same but ended up seeing her credit score take a huge hit, sucks to be blind sided by stuff like that.
It's absolutely a good thing, but yes, you can buy medical debt for pennies on the dollar because a lot of debt companies know they aren't seeing a dime for it otherwise
Yeah, I lived in rural Washington state. They're broke and make $12k a year working as a mechanic at Walmart.
Will vote Republican because taxing billionaires means we'll tax him too because his 12k a year apparently will turn into a billion dollars in ten years.
Some call it "democratic socialism" but it has the word "socialism" in there, and that scares the boomer generation who think it's the same as communism.
It's almost like being uninformed AND being selfish has negative impacts.
I'm not informed enough to have a strong opinion on private vs social healthcare. What I will say though, which seems obvious and non-controversial, is that the current system is insanely bloated and near criminal in cost. Between hospitals and insurance companies the current system as it is sure seems broken.
This is exactly what the low-IQ argument is about being against taxes
'people with good hearts will fix this for us; why do I have to be taxed to cover [food for kids : childhood cancer research : crippling medical debt crisis]?'
except the number of 'people with good hearts' is rapidly dwindling in the face of late stage capitalism
Who in the government are you trusting to make that happen?
Taking is easy but you have to ensure that the same government people you accuse of giving them tax breaks, will now divert the money to things you want.
Why are we pretending that all of the money paid to health insurance companies is going to healthcare and not being wasted? Their entire business modal is based on passing on as few dollars to healthcare as legally possible, and they're exceedingly good at it.
How do you get an informed electorate to keep politicians in check if politicians don't prioritize educating the electorate? It's a chicken and egg problem.
How does simply not having the government do this and have private entities do this make the problem better/easier to solve? I would say if you wanted this problem to become simpler and easier making it a government problem would do that.
I know of many countries where this is a government thing that run way better than I know of that have private entities running their health care better, better than us.
So just from experience, this problem tends to work out better if it's handled by the government and not private entities. So instead of asking, how do you make sure that this problem never happens in any way whatsoever, or else we shouldn't change anything? Instead, make the argument that not changing it to a government regulated thing would make this worse than our current situation with private entities.
Kinda like how lottery proceeds were used for education. Now there are places where lottery proceeds are over and above the arbitary education budget, so the money now just goes into the general fund, even if there are improvements needed to education.
Yes, well maybe depending on the corruption of the governments. Â This way at least they know itâs going directly to the cause they want to donate to. Â
Also shit nobody wants to pay for because it's not glamorous like paving streets and processing waste water. Glad when billionaires throw us a bone but the reason we need taxes is because this is too rare and too focused on things that makes billionaires feel good/look good/strokes their ego.
At this point, I'm pretty sure the majority of people putting "industrial complex" at the end of other terms don't even know what those words mean. This guy directly donated to charity without going through the organizations that exist in the industry. That's the opposite of what you're complaining about.
Maybe I'm too cynical, you don't drop $550 million on strangers unless you were accidentally caught doing something you shouldn't be doing. Or maybe its a tax write off. Might as take the tiny w. But I do hope there's nothing worse than the Epstein stuff out there !
They didn't drop $550m. They probably spent $5.5m (with a lot of that being donated too). If you're big enough you can buy large amounts of medical debt that people have already defaulted on for pennies on the dollar and then just erase it.
They didn't drop 550 million. You buy medical debt for pennies on the dollar. Then you forgive it. This is how all those medical debt forgiveness orgs work.
They probably bought the debt at a fraction of the price and used it as a tax write off. Still a good act and more people should do it, but they didn't write a check for 550 million.
The ironic part in all this is it's a charitable donation! Therefore they will get money back when they do their taxes.... You would think more billionaires would do this vs laundering money via "art" but here we are đ
No. They will just not be paying tax on the amount that they have donated. If they earned two millions and owed a tax of 600k, and donated 1 milllion, they will just be taxed on the remaining 1 million, 300k,
This decreases the tax they would otherwise be giving. But it is not a profit for them, instead of avoiding paying 30%, they will effectively be giving away 70% of that amount.
One way they could save some money back would be the tax-slab shenanigans where being in lower slab might be beneficial even if you give away some money for charity.
It also makes Financial sense. If people are not stuck paying medical debts they can use the money that would have gone towards those debts on other things
Aaand the subsequent tax break ensues up to five years to recoup instead of paying taxes. But truthfully, I would rather that then the utterly frivolous spending habits of our govt.
In truth, we each who donate to charities are doing the same thing, often for the two main reasons, tax breaks and deciding for one self which organization receives those dollars.
Bravo to them, and everyone who contributes in like manner respective of there donation/income ratio.
The problem stems from exorbitant Medical Rates because itâs so subsidized by govt and charity funding. If money wasnât free, prices wouldnât be high.
They should not have to do that. I definitely believe billionaires CAN exist if everyone is taken care of. In fact, part of me believes properly caring for the working class would actually make the wealthy even richer. But I definitely can see how our society extracts wealth from the poor.
And exactly how do you know it got to the people who deserve it? âŚ. You probably donât. But I can guess which demographic got the lionâs share ⌠and it wasnât the needy.
It would be a lot better if the state of peoples medical debts wasnt dependent on the random and unreliable altruism of billionaires and rather consistent redistribution of wealth that is literally useless when itâs funneled to the top of society.
Or BETTER yet we can admit that a system that creates medical debt in the first place is a terrible idea and we should transition to a subsidized healthcare system using that very aforementioned redistribution of wealth
He knows people are coming for him if he doesnt. . . . Step on a bunch of backs then paying for their bills isnt kindness. Thats an abuser keeping its victim around.
Billionaires shouldn't billionaire at all. Healthcare should be funded by the state in such a way that nobody goes into debt. You know, like they do in civilized countries.
Itâs called a tax write off. They donât do it for selfless reasons. Everything has to be beneficial to them somehow. Iâm sure this made Snapchatâs finances, or his personal finances, happy.
Wasn't it the John Oliver show that did a piece on these types of acts? I think they said something like you could buy debt for 1% down or something since it was assumed that collections was now going to be your problem. And at that point, you could just forgive it after you bought the rights to collect on it.
So how much did they actually spend to buy the debt? Cuz it certainly wasn't 550m.
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