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Insurance Won't Cover Smartphones, When Pricey Alternatives Exist
consonant writes "The NY Times has an article on insurers refusing to cover cheaper devices such as iPhones and netbooks which may be used by the speech-impaired, and instead requires them to acquire devices that cost from 10 to 20 times as much. The reason? 'Insurance is supposed to cover medical devices, and smartphones or PCs can be used for nonmedical purposes, like playing video games or Web browsing.' From the article: 'For the millions of Americans with A.L.S., Down syndrome, autism, strokes and other speech-impairing conditions, the insurance industry's aversion to covering mainstream devices adds to the challenges they face. Advocates say using an everyday device to communicate can ease the stigma and fear of making the adjustment. At the same time, current policies mean that the government and private insurers may be spending unnecessary dollars on specialty machines.'"
It'll be amazing how many people suddenly come down with "disabilities" once insurance companies start paying for fancy PDAs and SmartPhones...
Also, once a PDA or SmartPhone is declared a "medical device," it will be subject to the same approvals and liabilities as medical devices, and will therefore cost 10 to 20 times as much as they do today...
This "insurance is supposed to cover medical devices" comes directly from government regulation. Even if an insurance company like Nationwide wanted to provide coverage to buy an Iphone for their hearing-disabled customer, they could not do it, else they'd be fined by the U.S. Congress.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
... is there anything stupid, evil or simply wrong that they will not do?
At the same time, current policies mean that the government and private insurers may be spending unnecessary dollars on specialty machines
That's the point, isn't it?
On the one hand, devices have to go through insane amounts of certification to pass as an official medical device. On the other hand, I'm sure medical device manufacturers really don't want cheap (or even reasonably priced) software on commodity devices eating their lunch.
I suspect the regulations are doing their work for them, but if they weren't, they'd be colluding with the insurers to make damn sure they didn't support commodity devices.
Is anyone really suprised by this move?
Insurance isn't about helping people. It's about making money. And such devices are cheaply made and prone to problems and breaking.
Just good business not to cover them.
I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn't know how lost I was
Until I found you
I was beat incomplete
I'd been had, I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new
Chorus:
Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
When your heart beats (after first time, with your heartbeat)
Next to mine
Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
cause only love can last
You're so fine and you're mine
Make me strong, yeah you make me bold
Oh your love thawed out
Yeah, your love thawed out
What was scared and cold
MADONNA IS THE BEST!
What TFS leaves out is that the reason "medical devices" cost so much is FDA regulations and the higher standards to which they are held. There is no possible way an iPhone could be certified as a "medical device". If Apple were to apply for certification, they would need to make a lot of changes, such as...wait for it...eliminating the ability to run 3rd party code.
Yes, insurance companies can be stupid when applying rules against paying for certain devises or "experimental" procedures. But ask the women whose lives were cut short by Congress forcing them to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
When will it stop? These devices can be lost or stolen far to easily , not to mention go into the wash
by accident. The number of claims would clog the system. What is next? Insuring pall point pens?!?!
It reminds me of transit benefits, and how you're only allowed to use them for getting to and from work - God forbid that we take public transit for personal trips - it would be a tragedy... also, it reminds me how the Aptera is ineligible for auto-industry loans because it only has three wheels and the law says an auto has four wheels.... at least Congress is thinking about changing that one (well, at the "this is eligible for loans" level, not the "cars have four wheels" level. . .)
-- still wondering why my health insurance can't be more like my auto insurance, where I get to pick someone who has their act together...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Is anyone really surprised?
The American healthcare system is just a complete joke to every civilized country with a reasonable system. It is built of pure greed and entirely designed for the rich at the cost of letting the poor die (literally). But I guess that is what Americans want so they can claim they don't have socialized medicine and the guy on the monopoly board can gain $200 when you land on his hospital.
can govt pay for my ATV? The alternative is a really expensive wheel chair...
sheesh, no wonder insurance rates are skyrocketing
as such why do people think health insurance is prohibitively expensive when bought outside an employer, granted its not cheap through an employer either.
Government regulations, read mandates.
Its not legal to buy health insurance across state lines, you can't even take individual health policies across most lines, all unless your covered by your employer. Your employer gets a tax deduction for your insurance that you cannot get if you buy your own. when you go to buy it you get soaked because each state piles on its mandated coverage to the already onerous federal mandates.
From mental health to smoking cessation. From pregnancy to implants. You will end up paying for coverage you will not use, in many cases cannot use, all because of some petty politicians whim. That is why we have 1000 page health bills, not because they are looking out for us, they are deciding what is and what isn't.
So yeah, I can totally see one device used in preference to another, the government says "this is what we will pay for and this list shows the extent of what qualifies"
How in the hell do you think the hovaround business stays in business. Because of the stroke of a pen makes anyone with a job buy them for people who may not even want them.
It will get vastly worse when the government takes total control. Every bit player will get their funding for their "medical" devices and the only thing not getting real money is patient care.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No, really, it's everywhere.
A few years back, I had to have an operation on my foot. The doctor said he could do the operation in his office under local anesthetic and the whole thing would cost a couple thousand bucks (memory's fuzzy), or we could do it in a hospital where it'd be 5x more expensive. The catch? My insurance would cover the hospital outpatient surgery, but not his office (which was also a fully licensed and certified surgical center, just not attached to a hospital). So I did it in the hospital, of course; I was between contracts and couldn't afford to do otherwise even if I had felt noble enough to do it for the good of the health care system.
Misguided incentives like this are all over health insurance--just look at the varying coverage rates for preventive care vs. corrective care (like diabetes maintenance vs. amputations). If you can put off the treatment until later, there's a reasonable chance that some other insurance company will pick up the more expensive tab, and "patient outcomes? What's that?"
It's one of the strongest arguments for a single-payer healthcare system: the chance to remove loopholes that lead to these bad incentives.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
If the devices cost so little to begin with, why bother with insurance or money claims?
If i had a disability, i'd say 400 dollars is money well spent... and it would probably last you for a couple of years.
Sigs are for the weak.
I never thought I'd see an article that would refer to the iPhone as "cheap."
Customers: I've paid my insurance premiums all my life. Now that I've had this terrible accident I need you to cover some modest expenses required for me to maintain the semblence of the life I once had.
Insurers: We thank you for your custom. Your call is important to us. However, you fail to understand even the most basic aspects of our business model. We're here to fuck you, not help you. Coverage denied. Thank you for playing.
(Applicable to most forms of health-related insurance it seems)
In the context of things like this, it amazes me (as an American, no less) that the US still finds itself embroiled in the health-care debate the rest of the industrialized world successfully resolved more than 60 years ago (in some places, as long as 80-90 years ago). Even with neanderthals like the Republicans around, you'd have thought the moderate and progressive populations of the country would have dragged that country out of the stone age by now ... but I digress.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Insurance is about risk management. It's a financial product, not a health one. I pay someone x amount of dollars to provide me the right get y amount of money back based on a risk. By demanding that insurance companies provide all of these things that have absolutely nothing to do with risk, you've screwed this country up. You've basically, like all liberals, twisted something else an excuse to go steal some money.
If you want to have money for people with chronic conditions, make them a federal problem and pay for it with tax money. I recommend taxing intellectual property and imports to come up with the dough.
But for me, all I want is a financial product that says I get coverage for if I have a sudden expensive illness. I don't need or want the federal government, or my employer, to do that.
1. Get employers out of health
2. Put chronic illnesses onto the government
3. Cut everything out of insurance that is non-risk related.
Duh.
This is my sig.
People also need food, shelter, clothing and heat to stay healthy. Should we expect health insurance to pay for that?
There should be a principle like the legal de minimus rex that puts a floor on health-related expenses that we expect health insurance to cover.
Indeed, if we had stuck with the catastrophic major medical only policies that used to be the only kind of health insurance, our medical care would be much more affordable today. People would pay for routine doctor bills, and if doctors charged more than the common man can afford, they would lose business.
Vast numbers of 20-something males have come down with severe pain: 1/3rd of the MM patients are in this demographic according state statistics. Each patient is allowed to grow six plants at one time. However this task can be delegated to a "caregiver". There are now hundred ads filling five pages in our alternative weekly advertising caregivers.
Hey look! I take "subject of TFA" plus "current events" plus "car analogy" (well, auto industry subsidy analogy) to comment on the likely future outcome of related matters, and what thanks do I get? I'm moderated down to Flamebait oblivion! How dare I imply that the government takeover of health care which our current administration seeks will be anything less than a perfect utopia? It will be so good that everyone will get an iPhone for free, not just the people with speech impediments!
There's some insight to be drawn here about the everyday partisans who are supporting the public health-care cause. I'll leave it to you to figure out exactly what it is, though. In the meantime, go back and read the moderator guidelines... jerks.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I have 2 cousins who are deaf. They have been using smart phones for a long time rather than TTY devices. In addition, they are all over the net as a means of communication.
They have always paid for this out of pocket. Amazingly, they never had insurance companies to pay for their TTY devices in the first place (those devices cost around 400 bucks about twenty years ago) so I think they are happy just paying for a cheaper service.
I think getting closed captioning added to all televisions was the biggest savings for them. I know my aunt and uncle paid about 20 bucks a month or so and a couple hundred bucks up front for closed captioning devices about 20 years ago.
I'm not sure what insurance you would have that would have paid for these things in the past. I'm sure there are some plans, but honestly, for most 'normal' folks without great insurance plans, these things were just expenses that everyone paid for and just looked at as part of the expense of raising a child, no different than medicine, food, and clothing.
If a doctor writes a prescription for a non-prescription, that should count for something.
Basically, this is no different than a doctor telling a patient "keep weight off that foot: use a walker, crutches, or cane" but insurance will only cover the walker or crutches not a cane, which may be less expensive.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The ONLY way that an insurance company should be able to insure a phone is if the phone has everything stripped of it except for the ability to dial 911 and use the medical software. Why the hell is anyone assuming that slapping an iBandaid program on something means that if your dumb ass drops the iPhone in the toilet someone else should pay to replace it?
That was, in fact, informative. Not sure exactly why the question was marked flamebait, but I guess it wasn't you who went and did it, so... Thanks.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
As the Obama healthcare reform is also international news, I read an analysis of the US medical system here in the local newspaper in The Netherlands. The US as a country spends twice as much for it's healthcare as Germany and France, while only 83% of the US Americans have an insurance.
This is because US healthcare is not about health; it is about the caring industry. There's no room for prevention (as there's no profit from prevention), there's only room for Care.
TFA seems just like another example of it.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Well, I guess technically if there was something stupid, evil or simply wrong that requires them to pay money for, they'd probably try to weasel out of it :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If there ever was a good excuse for crippled software then this might be it. Allow the application to lock out all the other functions of the iphone the insurance companies fear. That way you get the cost savings of a commondity device as the platform, but avoid the temptation of people to try to get phony perscriptions. I sort of doubt this temptation logic but the insurance companies probably know better than I do about how that goes. There are tonnes of shady companies pushing home health devices that can be justified under medicare but don't really work or soon break (e.g. scooters whose batteries quickly die). They can just imagine how an easy to sell iphone would become.
Moreover you can imagine that while this test to speech is a compelling use case, there are tonnes of other marginal justifications. for example, a timer application might be sold as a reminder for diabetics to check their glucose. A web based local pollen count application for asthmatics. all of these justifying that the insurance companies buy someone an iphone.
(by the way getting diagnosed as an asthmatic is apparently easy since all the pro bike riders have prescriptions for inhalers for brochial passage enlargers)
making the app cripple the device would sort of fix the dillema but still allow genuine need cases to get what they need.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is Slashdot. Everything government does is treasonous and everything business does is beautiful!
That's not been the case in the countries that do in fact have total government control of health care spending.
(Fingers in ears) La-la-la I can't hear you!
Here's the funny thing. The central issue is that the American solution to health care means that doctors are incentivized to keep us sick, to over medicate us, and to avoid inexpensive solutions to our problems. Insurance companies are incentivized to not provide coverage, most especially to those who are sick. There is no market solution to this problem, because every other method provides less profit, which is an unacceptable model to all corporations.
From what I gather, in Canada and England and France, there are speech therapists that provide free services to anyone who has a disability. So your point is moot - there is probably no reason they would provide an iPhone. They provide you with professional care that has a long history of success, instead of some application that hit the market a few months ago.
This is central to why single payer is so effective. They don't go looking for expensive new solutions when they know how to solve problems already, because there's no incentive. The only criteria for single payer systems is the effectiveness of care. The only criteria for private health care is the profit that can be realized. I'll leave it to your imagination on what incentive structure provides the best care for the least amount of money to the greatest amount of people.
Even with neanderthals like the Republicans around
This is Slashdot, land of self-righteous, angry conservatives. You must not value your karma very much.
Don't like Medicare's inannity? Talk to your Congresscritter at the next election.
Don't worry, they'll respond when a fuss is made. Remember, they're not out to do good. They're out to get and keep power. one hell of a lot more explanatory and predictive power than does the "oh he cares about me" theory. No, seriously. Don't downmod me. Read my .sig and file this away as a theory in the back of your mind and pay attention to life as it goes by. I'm not afraid of predictive theories, so why should you be?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
An iPhone will be replaced in ~5 years when the iPhone 7 comes out.
I'm not so sure the speak-o-matic 10,000 will be.
So should the insurer payout for a new iPhone every 5 years or the speak-o-matic once?
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Make the commercial devices available through the states' vocational rehabilitation offices. Sell them for more than on the street because of the administrative hassles. The states will cover the costs and give them or sell them at reduced prices to the clients. They'll also replace them as needed. If and when the replacement costs get too high, the states will tell the insurance companies to cover them. The insurance companies require each state's permission to operate there, and renewal or rejection can be based on this.
On the other hand, the devices can be covered under renter's or homeowners insurance.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
[citation needed]
Why not get them covered by your home contents insurance? Most people don't realise they usually cover goods outside of the home and it's not that expensive.
People gripe about the NHS, and like every medical system in the world, it does have its problems, but I've seen worse reports about far worse hospitals and systematic medical abuse in the US. Indeed, google "malpractice", "medical abuse", and "nursing home abuse" and you'll find the horrors in the American system dwarf those of most of the rest of the industrialized world, not just in number, but in severity.
As someone who has used both the American and British systems (as well as the French and German system by the way), I can unequivocably say that the NHS is as good as and often better than the American system by every metric, including timliness of treatment, quality of treatment, professionalism, cost, you name it. Unlike most of the right-wing ignoramouses here I've actually travelled beyond the borders of my country and indeed lived many years abroad, and have seen different systems first hand. Wait times in the US for privately insured patients are, contrary to myth and right-wing propoganda, at least as long as they are in the UK (where I currently reside), and longer than in France and Germany (both of which also have what Americans call "socialized" medicine).
And before my fellow countrymen start chanting "Best in the World" to themselves, they really ought to stop and ask themselves why the richest Russians, Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans all tend to go to France, Germany and the UK for their treatment rather than the US (not always, but more often than not). Hell, even Farah Faucette ended up travelling to Germany to treat her cancer because she couldn't get the proper treatment in the US (and lived for years longer than expected as a result). Why do so many travel to France, Germany, and the UK rather than the United States? I'll give you a hint: it isn't about money (these people are richer than God), nor about getting a Visa (these people belong to the moneyed elite and can buy their way into anyplace, be it the European Union, the United States, hell, even Switzerland). These people go where they believe they'll get the best medical treatment bar none, at any price, and more often than not, it isn't the United States. And that will probably continue, no matter how often we lie to ourselves about being "the best in the world." We're not, in many things, most especially medicine, and it's high time we recognized this and remediated it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If the iphone costs 1/10th the cost they are already winning. Don't bitch for things you don't need.
So what's up with the modding for this thread. Someone makes an assertion about US law and when people post asking for a citation they are modded down as offtopic or flamebait? Are there astroturfers from political lobbies or healthcare companies active here or is it just a bunch of opinionated people who are trying to abuse the mod system to shout down people who disagree with their party? I find the modding here as interesting as the article.
I'm a little surprised to hear the iPhone referred to as a "low end" device.
The rest of the summary makes me think what it would be like if the Auto Industry did the same. Isn't that ludicrous? It seems like the cell phone insurance industry should be sued. Insurance is insurance, if I pay to have my device insured -- that exactly what I expect. That's what I pay for.
Yeah, in our system, we may pay a lot more money and get worse results than, you know, everyone else in the developed world... but hey, at least we don't have government bureaucrats* getting between us and our doctors! USA! USA!
* Instead, we have bureaucrats from the for-profit insurance companies, who make money by denying us care, and answer to no one but their stockholders.
We don't have sensible health care coverage here. Maybe soon, but not now.
Amazingly, insurance companies rarely cover hearing aids. Actual medical devices for enabling those of us with hearing disabilities to partake in conversations. Why a smartphone is a medical device is a mystery to me. So, until the article poster can get insurance companies to cover real medical devices, he should just stop whining about his ipod not being covered! I pay out of pocket for my hearing aids, $1200-$5000 per. Don't come whining to me about your $300 PDA! You want to use a PDA and you have a communicative disease, shell out the bucks. he fact you can get actual medical devices and have them covered by insurance says to me you have no room to complain. Most companies won't pay for my REAL medical devices.
Not that they are any better than sticking a megaphone to my ear, which is mainstream and I could use, and would be cheaper. Be thankful you are covered for actual devices that are designed to work for your medical condition and come back and complain when you have a real issue! Hell, hearing aids are little amplifiers they made to stick in your ear, which only speeds the further degradation of your hearing, and thus you need to keep buying more and more powerful devices. There is surgery for some conditions and I could get an implant to actually help fix my problem, but insurance companies don't cover that $10,000 surgery. SO STOP YOUR WHINING! You don't hear me writing articles whining about my sad state.
Yet, you hear all these people complaining about the public option, and the healthcare reform, but offer no alternative. If you're not willing to be a part of the solution and come out of your little private self-interest corner and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT FOR EVERYONE, then you have no right or reason to complain!
[citation needed]
It's "flamebait" to ask someone for a citation for a fairly strong claim? Give me a break.
Being a hearing-disabled person, I can tell you with no uncertainty, that an IPhone is exactly what you don't want if you are:
partially deaf/hard-of-hearing/hearing challenged/whatever.
What a hearing-disabled person needs is a hearing aid that works with a phone, but the hearing aid is likely not covered. You're talking BS, or just don't know what you're talking about, or just have no clue what it is like to be really hard-of-hearing. IPhones are flat, if you're going to use a phone you want one that is T4/T5, or/and is TTY compatible, and you want one that molds to your face, so you can have the speaker pointing directly into your ear and have the microphone somewhere in the neighborhood of your speaking apparatus (aka mouth, for most of us).. Every single PDA/Smartphone I've seens is incredibly non-user friendly for hard-of-hearing people. You also, want one that has a decent ringer, and I'm not talking musical scores, unless it's like "Highway To Hell", or something, at 110db. Britney Spears "My head is Shaved, Do you Love Me" ain't gonna cut it.
PS. Being deaf or partially so is the most discriminated group you will likely find. If you are, you are labelled:
... der ... stan ... d be..tt..er.
1) Slow,
2) a whiner,
3) a faker.
You get people who think if they shout, you'll hear better. Which for some hearing loss conditions will work, but not for all.
If they talk slower, you'll un
If they repeat the same thing over and over again in the same voice and lack of enunciated slur and same volume you'll eventually get it.
Talking louder does help, for my condition, if you have activate any nerves I have left to process voice, but frequencies matter. There are some people I simply cannot hear, because I don't hear in those frequency ranges, or in the ranges of the significant harmonics. Sound is easy to hear, speech is an entirely different ballpark, and a PDA/Iphone which indiscriminately amplifies all ranges and all frequencies is going to be far worse for a person in the long run, rather than an actual device designed specifically for the individual. There are some really fantastic hearing aids out there now, unfortunately, they run $4000-$6000 per (and most people need two) and are a bit out of my current range for out of pocket medical devices. Real medical devices are expensive for a reason. they are not mass produced to one specification and are one off pieces designed for maximizing assistance to a specific condition of a specific person. Simple economics, it's cheaper to build ten thousand identical pieces than ten thousand custom pieces. Should be a no brainer.
So accept the more expensive machine, sell it, and buy an iphone or whatever it is you want. Profit?!?! (Something like that, right?)
"For the millions of Americans with A.L.S., Down syndrome, autism, strokes and other speech-impairing conditions"
down syndrome...wait...what?
the kids retarded, not mute. im pretty sure i heard him say "i can count to potato!" the last forty or fifty times. no iphone required.
Autistic people granted are broad, but are either completely incapable of conversation, or theyre found annoying when they attempt it through mirroring an entire episode of sesame street in a bank or church. nothing requiring an iphone there.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Medical insurance is to cover actual medical devices. There is a very good reason these things cost more than a smartphone ever would. They need to be safety tested with live humans, and that is not cheap.
True for things that can kill you if they fail. Imagine an implanted pacemaker blowing up like an iPhone ;-)
But if you use a smartphone (with special software) in a way similar to how able-bodied people use it, special safety testing may be unnecessary.
Hence I propose a new category "medical assistance device (non-hazardous)" that can be used without expensive special certification. It could cover things like general purpose computers that are loaded with special software, limited to applications where errors pose no significant health hazard.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I think the punch of this story is supposed to be related an apparent fact that the makers of these expensive devices that do only one thing have had their hands in the cookie jar for so long and are now exerting their vast influence to decide the outcome over whether insurance will be allowed to pay for their superior competitor at 5-10% the price instead. All of the other points I've read by comment posters so far seem to be pale in comparison.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Do you really think that insurance companies would have much power or money if healthcare became really cheap and successful? For companies passing money along, their own profits usually end up being a percentage of what flows through them. That's why insurance companies actually don't mind the cost explosion in the health care system; they don't pay for it, you do, they just take a cut.
Check out "ObamaCare Yay Or Nay? The Truth About Canada!" by Steven Crowder on YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw)
Crowder grew up in Canada. In the video, he goes "undercover" with a video camera along with Canadian citizens to visit some waiting rooms in Canadian medical clinics to discover what typical Canucks experience.
If you are looking at the aforementioned YouTube video, you may want to skip ahead to 10 minutes, 19 seconds, where Crowder converses (in French) with a woman whose mother had both legs amputated.
Essentially the conclusion is that Canada's socialized medicine is not good. Crowder points out that Canadians -- including the architect of Canada's socialized medicine -- want to move to the U.S. system (Go to 16 minutes 0 seconds in the video)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Part of the reason medical insurance is so expensive is people seem to think it should cover EVERYTHING. Normal care, emergency care, preventative care, etc, etc. Any and every medical expensive they want paid for by insurance.
Well that's not insurance anymore. Insurance is supposed to be indemnity against unexpected costs. Your costs rise to a given level, or occur in an unexpected fashion, insurance pays for it.
For example my homeowners insurance is very cheap. It is a yearly payment, and that payment is maybe 60% of the monthly payment my employer makes for health insurance. However, all it covers is emergencies basically. If my place burns down, they pay out the value of it and its contents. However if I let my place fall apart due to lack of maintenance, they don't cover it. Also, anything under $500 isn't covered. So if someone attempted to rob me, which is covered, but all they did was break a window, I'd have to pay for it as it isn't above the deductible. As such it is very cheap, their liability is limited to a specific dollar amount, and they are only liable in certain cases.
My health insurance? Covers everything basically. They pay for doctors visits, specialist visits, ambulance rides, ER visits, surgery, medical items, etc, etc, etc all with no set liability limit. They can be on the hook for a LOT of money if something goes really wrong, and they can even have to pay out a good bit if nothing goes wrong. Every time I go to see the doctor I pay $10, they pick up the rest of the tab. If I were to go 20 times a year, that'd be over a grand, just for the visits they'd have to pay.
Thus it isn't surprising they want a bunch more money.
Well this stuff is just taking that same sort of idea to another silly extreme. Why the hell should your insurance cover basic, cheap, devices that make your life better? Buy that yourself. I understand wanting insurance to pay for something expensive, that's what it is for. If you need special custom hearing aids that cost $10,000, ya ok that's why you have insurance. If you need a cellphone, well go buy that shit.
Insurance really should only be to cover things that are very expensive, or unexpected expenses. Every day expenses you should cover yourself. Otherwise, you'll get a system where it costs a hell of a lot and/or you get shitty service.
FTA:
"A couple of years ago, she spent more than $8,000 to buy a computer, approved by Medicare".
The article suggests she's had to pay out for the devices. If her health insurance is providing for the device, I don't see the problem. Yes, it might be stupid that they pay out for $8,000 when she'd be satisfied with $300, but that's the company's own loss, not hers.
Now yes, I agree it's still a shame for her if the smaller devices are better for her disability. But the article is very confusing as to who's paying what, which is why I was asking for clarification.
(And what fucker is modding so many posts in this thread off-topic?)
US president for once can do something right: Fuck the american private healthcare.
You didn't read the article, did you?
All we are talking about here is using it as a speech synthesizer, not diagnosing diseases. You say "They need to be safety tested with live humans, and that is not cheap." I'm really baffled as to how one performs expensive testing of a speech synthesizer on humans? Perhaps the Stephen Hawking voice causes spontaneous combustion in humans? Enlighten me!
We stil got the best edumacation in the world. And ou're car indyustry pwn's then japs and yoorpiuns.
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
By "most of us" you mean the few people who run and work for insurance companies; thus making big profits from the current system, right? The rest of us want health care without some company making a profit by denying us health care.
Currently, health insurance profit-seeking executives make decisions on whether a device is medically necessary or not, and their bias is worse than you are aware. Far worse than any decisions I've seen made by Medicare. In my personal anecdotal sampling, Medicare has provided excellent care for friends and family. Private insurance? When available, it was always a battle, from waivers, to initial denials, to actually getting doctors and hospitals their checks; and friends going bankrupt when they couldn't afford insurance or were denied for pre-existing conditions (diabetes).
Want to talk about naive? Watch this interview with an (ex) health insurance executive.