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The Doctor Will See Your Credit Score Now
mytrip writes to mention that the same people who invented credit scores are working to create a similar system for hospitals and other health care providers. "The project, dubbed "MedFICO" in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient's ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive."
I'm kinda liking the idea of scores based on how likely all insurance companies (auto, medical, etc.) are to pay.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Scrap the HMOs (who are in business to make money, not provide health care), scrap the insurance companies (middle men extracting their pound of flesh) and return to a system where you pay for services rendered with insurance for catastrophic coverage.
As a Candian living in the US, you're preaching to the already converted, but still bewildered and dismayed, if not appalled.
I'll add an interesting tidbit of information. Three out of four voters in the US is a member of the American Association of Retired Persons. Sounds perfectly reasonable, given that older folks tend to be the ones that vote, but problematic when you consider that AARP is fundamentally an insurance company.
Insurance companies are Really Big business. And if Warren Buffett's investment preferences are any indication, more profitable than ever. I don't see them going away any time soon despite the gradual awareness by the electorate that their healthcare system, when viewed in the context of the rest of the industrialised world, is an embarassment.
Where is the costs in an MRI? I have had several and some of these machines are 20 years old or better. You would assume that they are paid for at 1500 a pop. Sure there is on going maintenance and staff but where is the cost? I got my MRIs at a diagnostic imagine center who had someone in the machines every 30 minutes. $1500 a pop, they were open between 7 am and 8 pm so at twice an hour or so they would make roughly 39,000 a day. I'm sure they aren't spending that much a day but lets just say they only make half that, it is still $97,000 a week on one machine. They have three or four of these running like this plus CT and Xray machines plus they have a blood lab. It is in a medical building that houses something like 40 specialist offices with different fields so they are packed all the time.
This doesn't even address the fact that Vet labs can do MRIs for less then $200. I know it isn't the same thing but if they can buy the equipment, pay the staff, train the staff, and offer the services at those prices, they it shouldn't be much more difficult for a hospital or imaging lab to do the same.
So why is the cost of a MRI $1500? Because they can charge that much, it is the only reason, their break even point is far less then that and likely even less of the machine is paid for and in maintenance mode. I'm willing to bet that $300 is the real costs (staff, using the machine, electric per use and so on) and they only wanted to cover that with the Cash billing. To me, that makes a firm $1500 a little bit stupid. It is a medical procedure, not a Car or Big Screen TV.
I don't buy into the socialized medicine, but I think there is some things that can happen to make it more affordable to the less capable of paying for it. I don't have much sympathy for the GPs situation either, but saying it costs X dollars because that's what they standardized on is a little shady if you ask me. Especially when someone is being told that their lives or quality of health could depend having the test/procedure or not. If it was a TV or car and fear wasn't part of the choice in having it, then I could agree. In any other profession, the life and death fear factor along would be enough to get fraud charges dropped on the sales staff in most states.
You have to stop reading propaganda. The "severe debt" is usually a misrepresentation of an overall governmental debt which has been shrinking throughout Europe ever since most governments adopted "balanced budget" policies back in the 1980s. Many European governments routinely end up with budgetary surpluses which leads to a lively debate on how to spend them, with some advocating rapid debt reduction while others investment in other things. The same applies to Canada, which also sports socialized medicare and which has been running budgetary surpluses for almost a decade now.
As a matter of fact, the most debt inducing and downright ruinous economic policy is practiced by none other then the "free market knows best", "conservative" goofuses running the USA, where the government debt is spiralling completely out of control, with most of the money going to gigantic military contractors and mercenaries with no conceivable return on that investment to the average taxpayer other then piles of dead foreign people and rapidly increasing general global hostility, not to mention othe wee things such as the devastating trade imbalances.
It isn't, although some greed-monkeys, like our "small medical businessman" GP, do oh-so-dearly want it to be true.
See above. Most EU governments project declining debts, while the US debt is increasing astronomically, despite of the ever more obvious and heavy-handed attempts by the US elites to instill a vicious dog-eat-dog "society" in there, with clear-cut stratification of the economic royalty and the de-facto indentured slaves underneath.