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A Crowdfunding Site To Help Pay Patients' Medical Bills
Lucas123 writes: A start-up financial services company called Someone With Group has just completed a pilot of a crowdfunding service that allows hospitals to set up campaigns to help patients pay their medical expenses. The website, which is HIPAA compliant in terms of privacy and security, allows patients facing medical debts to inform family, friends and even strangers of their need for funds versus flowers or cards. The crowdfunding service also addresses a systemic debt issue in the healthcare industry. Each year, the U.S. healthcare industry writes off $40 billion in bad debt from unpaid medical bills. "Then you consider that $6 billion is spent on cards and flowers for patients every year. Why can't we redirect that money and put it into a debit instrument restricted to medical spending only?" said Jagemann-Bane, CEO of Someone With Group. One hospital group, Pinnacle Health Systems in Harrisburg, Penn., routinely writes off $40 million to $50 million a year in unpaid medical bills from patients. The hospital set up a crowdfunding site via Someone With Group and so far has seen a couple dozen patients use it. ... After a one-year pilot of the crowdfunding service, patients who've used it on average have raised $2,315.
I've got a better idea: Single payer.
The problem isn't that these people got sick. It's that they have incurred these radical medical bills as a result of contracts between the hospitals and the insurance companies to intentionally drive up the prices. This is the definition of collusion and for the insurance companies it borders on racketeering. Every hospital in the US is just as guilty as every medical insurance broker and until we call them on their shit you're only going to make things worse by enabling them.
But who cares as long as you can go to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, right?
While this is an interesting concept, I can't help but feel like this props up our predatory privatized health system which focuses more on profits than it does on treatment. If we're all going to pay for each other's medical bills via private insurance and crowdfunding, why not change to a public system rather than expect sick people to become beggars of their family and friends?
Only in the US would something like this be required.
Please pick one of the healthcare models here in Europe instead - around here we don't consider the value of a person's life to be based on how rich they are.
This is why I love living in the UK and will defend the NHS until my death.
Here in the UK I don't have to worry about the cost of my healthcare, and if I want it quicker or I want a nicer bed then I always have the option of paying privately anyway.
This is also why Jeremy Hunt can fuck off and keep his slimy mitts to himself.
Great, but what about the 3-year-old daughter of a colleague of mine with a brain tumor? Is that because she does drugs, or maybe she smokes?
Health is the responsibility of the person, not the community. Since the community has no say in how a person lives their life, whether that person smokes, gets drunk, uses drugs or is obese, why should the community be responsible to pay the medical bills for that person? Obviously the person doesn't care about their health or they wouldn't have chosen the lifestyle they lead.
A civilized society wouldn't force its citizens to hand over their money to protect those who choose to kill themselves through their own bad choices, especially when that society has endlessly informed its citizens about the dangers of such lifestyles choices.
Really - society bears no responsibility? Tell that to the people of Flint who have been poisoned by lead. Or the person walking down the street who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets shot/hit and run/raped?
These are not lifestyle choices.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Actually Americans as a proportion of there GDP spend more on health (2013 17.1%) than any other country exception of Tuvalu (19.7%) and America is one of richest countries in the world, per person it only it spends more any other country than except Switzerland and Norway (they obviously have a higher GDP per capita) yet Americans life expectancy is ranked 34th, Norway 9th, Switzerland 2nd. Clearly Americans are spending just more to get a worse health care. So who is squandering their money? Insurance companies by definition take their cut, of health care spending, it is in there interest to keep health care cost high so that they can sell insurance in the first place.
Ref: http://data.worldbank.org/indi... , http://data.worldbank.org/indi... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
These are not extreme cases at all, these are normal cases, people get sick, mostly through no predictable fault of their own. Yes people could save and plan for something happening, but with 11 out of 12 cancer drugs costing more than $100,000 per year (http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/medical-costs/how-much-does-chemotherapy-cost/). The cost of a heart bypass surgery (which is not uncommon surgery) is $70,000-$200,000 without insurance, the main contributing factor to heart disease is genetics. Even the most fugal saver on an average income would probably be ruined by these expenses. This is not the cost of a luxury goods, unless you mean a Ferrari, and staying alive is not a luxury, it is by definition a necessity.
Providing health care to the poor, benefits everyone, rich included. Having a population with lots of unhealthy people can infect the rich as well, a virus does not look at the size of your bank balance before infecting you.