MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Fri, 01 Sep 2006

This little tale hit pretty close to home. The bills have started arriving for my Mom's "minor thingy", and they are nothing short of amazing themselves.

For the initial "event", on Monday night, she was taken two blocks from her apartment to the local hospital in an ambulance, looked over in the emergency room by a doctor and kept there for roughly two hours while they gathered the paperwork to send 25 miles to the Indiana Heart Center in an ambulance. That's all she's gotten paperwork for so far, but just that first evening generated a bill of $10,800.

As I suspected, there's not going to be anything minor about the financial impact of this thingy. Now, ~~the taxpayers~~ Medicare picks up the tab, to be sure, and I'm grateful that my mom's not dead of her thingy, but still ... healthcare is turning into the Blob, and it's going to eat us all for lunch if we can't figure out how to get it under control.

How to run up a $17,000 hospital tab without actually being sick.

(link) [Seattle Weekly]

via MyAppleMenu:Reader

/Politics | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 9/2/2006 10:33:22
Rod wrote

scrwtape @ sunflower. com

I *work* for Medicare. I've seen in the 3 1/2 years I've worked there how they've managed to give more and more to the profit driven insurance companies. This latest Prescription Drug program raised *all* of our medication over 30% so *they* could receive the "windfall" of the new program. That same PDP was *written* by the damn companies and in so many different ways *screws* people, throw in that if you *don't* participate when you first are elligible when you actually *need* the coverage they can take on 1% *for every month* that you didn't take it. So don't take this program now wait five years and they double the price on you nearly and there is *nothing* you can do. I'm not even going into how this has made people not get access to needed medication and has *increased* deaths and crazy people on the streets because any of the expencive medicines are by and large either one of the non-covered catagories or because it's expensive they just don't cover it. Most States can't afford to pay it (as their medicaid budget now must go to the Feds to support this program) and people are well ... just fucked if it isn't covered. Since they have theoretical covereage the pharmaceutical companies (who also helped write this program) have stopped many of their low income help programs. That's just on the medicine aspect, I really and honestly think the administration is trying to kill this "entitlement" program by handling this in the worst possible way to make people have *no* choice but to shut it down or bankrupt the SS program even more.

On 9/3/2006 13:23:53
Dave H wrote

Well

Medicare's still an entitlement program: it's just that now it's the healthcare industry that's entitled to it's benefits, rather than the retired. Thanks for the comment and Be well, Dave H.

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