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Man Robs Bank of $1 To Get Health Care In Jail
f1vlad writes "A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report."
So what you're saying is that he'll have to commit a more serious crime?
$1500 is a lot when you're out of work. And more to the point, how often can that 1500 re-occur? Admittedly I'm in canada so we don't treat people like they'll have to pay out of pocket. But my best friend at 29 had cancer. He was admitted, sent home, re-admitted to hospital several times in a week, and 3 times in one day. It wasn't even that the hospital was trying to be rid of him, he just had a lot of different parts of his body failing in different ways and they'd solve one problem, send him home (because the feeling is you recover better at home) and 2 days later something else would go wrong.
He's sorted out health wise now. But that's beside the point. If you end up in hospital multiple times in a month, how often will your insurance re-bill you.
What does "full coverage" mean? Prescription drugs? Do you have a co-pay? If you have a deductible of 1500 in hospital care (or something like that) it's certainly not 'full'. What if you go to a hospital in a different city than where you live? Does your insurance company approve (or not) of places you can go? Also, under what conditions can they drop your coverage. That was the trick with my friend, as he learned through friends in various support groups. In the US the first time you get cancer you're probably covered by insurance. But the moment they think you're cured for 3 months they drop your ass like a rock, and no one else will touch you with a 100 metre, I'm sorry, foot, pole, and then you're in deep shit.
About six years ago I developed a kidney stone that refused to pass. I was right out of college, had just lost my health coverage and did not have a job with insurance. The pain was chronic and possibly dangerous (I won't go into the details but also fairly rare). Finally I went to my local hospital and paid out of pocket. After four or five visits along with a CT scan and a trip to the emergency room (and about six hundred dollars in hospital bills) they finally told me that I needed lithotripsy to destroy the stone. Because I had no insurance the cost of them blasting the stone in an out patient operation (basically going into the hospital that morning and being kicked to the curb by lunch) was roughly 8000 dollars. Instead I flew to Germany where a weeks stay in the hospital and two lithotripsy operations (because the stone did not break up the first time) along with x-rays, ultrasounds and other tests cost me 3000 dollars. Add in a plane ticket that cost about 600 and I paid less then half to fly across the world to get the operation done then I would have paid here in the states (even worse, if I had to have two operations in the states the total would have been 16,000, whereas the German doctors only charged me a few hundred more for a few more days in the hospital). I had grown up hearing all my life about the horrors of socialized medicine. About long waits and incompetent care. What I experienced was the opposite. I had longer waits in US hospitals (including a two hour wait for a CT scan, I never waited more then half an hour for anything in Germany). What shocked me more was how brazenly I was treated by the doctors here in the US, who seemed almost uninterested in what I had to say and were more interested in getting me out of their office. I also had the unfortunate experience in the US during this time of having one of my samples switched with someone else's and had the doctor (erroneously) call me into the office to tell me I had Hepatitis C. I wasn't amused.