how many of you buy medical/dental insurance? And how much is it?

[ScottTheFish]

[ QUOTE ]


YA, MAN, SCREW THE POOR!!!

[img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Um, apparently you missed the part where I said the poor have their health care covered. There are public hospitals that are paid for by taxes, and other welfare type programs for the poor. I'm not talking about the poor.

I'm saying the average person should pay for their own health insurance, instead of looking for a government handout. Personal responsibility anyone?

[ScottTheFish]

[ QUOTE ]


Sad but true. Then your credit is screwed for life. Then you can't buy a house and sometimes can't get a job because of your credit. Then you are forced to do criminal activities to make $$. Then you go to prison and have taxpayers support you. I love America but we need to do something.


[/ QUOTE ]

Oh give me break. Do people really think like this? Scary.

People with unpaid medical bills can get jobs, LOL. Yeah it can ruin your credit score. That's not the end of the world.

Health care is expensive, you're right. That's what insurance is for. Say you can't afford insurance? I say BS. Anyone with a decent job can afford at least catastrophic health insurance, which won't pay for every doctor visit and drug, but will keep you out of financail ruin.

No job? poor? disabled? There are government programs to help you. That's who the government programs are for. Not the average person.

[adamstewart]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


YA, MAN, SCREW THE POOR!!!

[img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Um, apparently you missed the part where I said the poor have their health care covered. There are public hospitals that are paid for by taxes, and other welfare type programs for the poor. I'm not talking about the poor.

I'm saying the average person should pay for their own health insurance, instead of looking for a government handout. Personal responsibility anyone?

[/ QUOTE ]


I know this isn't the forum to be discussing this in, but I can't resist.......


In a two-tiered health care system (like you have suggested), the good health care resources and personel are drawn into the private sector, leaving the public sector with the crumbs.

Is it fair to say the poor don't deserve as good of health care as the rich? Doesn't this devalue the poor's health/life?


Adam

[chesspain]

[ QUOTE ]
What happens if you don't have insurance and the hospital treats you and then you decide to simply not pay them?

What can they do?

[/ QUOTE ]

The more passive hospital billing agencies will send your name to a collection agency, and if you don't pay this bill it will end up on your credit report. As a landlord, I am less likely to rent to someone who has a history of failing to pay medical bills. If I do rent to them, I may charge them a higher rent to cover myself for the increased risk of default. Obviously, having bad items on your credit report will increase the interest rates one will pay for a car loan, mortgage, etc.

In addition, some hospitals more recently have taken to suing patients over unpaid bills--and when victorious, have been able to place liens on patients' homes.

[MicroBob]

[ QUOTE ]
Doesn't this devalue the poor's health/life?

[/ QUOTE ]



you pretty much got it.

welcome to america.


(this country REALLY freaking annoys me sometimes)

[balkii]

my insurance plan:

medical: 73$/mo for catastrophic (5k deductible)
that should cover my ass should something bad happen

dental: LOTS OF FLOSS, and regular brushing. then a $200 cleaning/checkup once a year. if you break that down by months its quite manageable.

vision: lots of carrots.

[A_C_Slater]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
What happens if you don't have insurance and the hospital treats you and then you decide to simply not pay them?

What can they do?

[/ QUOTE ]

The more passive hospital billing agencies will send your name to a collection agency, and if you don't pay this bill it will end up on your credit report. As a landlord, I am less likely to rent to someone who has a history of failing to pay medical bills. If I do rent to them, I may charge them a higher rent to cover myself for the increased risk of default. Obviously, having bad items on your credit report will increase the interest rates one will pay for a car loan, mortgage, etc.

In addition, some hospitals more recently have taken to suing patients over unpaid bills--and when victorious, have been able to place liens on patients' homes.

[/ QUOTE ]


So basically, if you make a living playing poker and you only plan to live in apartments the rest of your life anyway and you always pay the full years lease up front then they can't do [censored] to you.

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sticking it to the man. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[WWJFergusonD?]

[ QUOTE ]

You are seriously misguided as to the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian and US health systems. There are public hositals for people who can't afford insurance, so your tax dollars do provide health care for the poor. If you're not poor you need to be paying for health insurance.

Socialized medicine is awesome as long as you don't mind waiting months for any kind on non-emergency care. Do you think more people come to the US from Canada for health care, or the other way around?


[/ QUOTE ]

Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman offers this assessment about the United States' private health care system versus the public health care systems of countries like Canada, Britain, Germany, and France. I tend to believe the economist who knows all the figures. YMMV, though.

"A dozen years ago, everyone was talking about a health care crisis. But then the issue faded from view: a few years of good data led many people to conclude that H.M.O.'s and other innovations had ended the historic trend of rising medical costs.

But the pause in the growth of health care costs in the 1990's proved temporary. Medical costs are once again rising rapidly, and our health care system is once again in crisis. So now is a good time to ask why other advanced countries manage to spend so much less than we do, while getting better results.

Before I get to the numbers, let me deal with the usual problem one encounters when trying to draw lessons from foreign experience: somebody is sure to bring up the supposed horrors of Britain's government-run system, which historically had long waiting lists for elective surgery.

In fact, Britain's system isn't as bad as its reputation - especially for lower-paid workers, whose counterparts in the United States often have no health insurance at all. And the waiting lists have gotten shorter.

But in any case, Britain isn't the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don't pinch pennies to the same extent - like France, Germany or Canada - but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's - and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don't have a waiting list problem.)

Let me rattle off some numbers.

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

What do we get for all that money? Not much.

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada."

[surfdoc]

[ QUOTE ]
Chief,

I consider $20k catastrophic for some people. While it is on the low side moneywise, what if you wait for 5 hours at a public facility in a big city to be examined and the appendix bursts? Let's take Bellevue vs NYU Medical Center 5 blocks apart. In NYU, with your medical card, you will get quick service. At Bellevue, you might die. That's a catastrophe, n'est-ce pas?

MK

[/ QUOTE ]

This is total rubbish. Several things. You imply here that a "public" facility is somehow free or cheaper. That is just not true. You also state that having your insuance card with you could save your life or get you quicker service. This is also completely ridiculous. This is my business. I may not know much about poker, but I know about this. Federal law prohibits selective treatment for emergency patients based on insurance funding. If you are really sick, you will be moved ahead if possible. The problem is this: too many people have no coverage and therfore don't seek medical care in the primary care clinics. ERs and hospitals then get overcrowded. Much more complex then this but I doubt anyone cares.

To the OP: get an HMO or some type of less expensive coverage and accept that you will get stuck for small bills on top of your insurance. If you are healty that is best and you will not have your life ruined financially should there be a major accident or illness (appendicitis counts).

[chief444]

[ QUOTE ]
In a two-tiered health care system (like you have suggested), the good health care resources and personel are drawn into the private sector, leaving the public sector with the crumbs.

Is it fair to say the poor don't deserve as good of health care as the rich? Doesn't this devalue the poor's health/life?


[/ QUOTE ]
Adam,

No offense, but of all the arguments for the Canadian style of health care vs. that in the US quality (including timeliness) of healthcare in general is definitely not a good one. Besides, where do you think a lot of the better Canadian physicians end up? It's not like they're unable to get into the US private sector. Immigration is a pain in general but not so much for anyone in a very specialized field where the demand is high.

Chief