re: Study: significant increase in patients who can't afford to pay full hospital bill

Hospitals are allowed to write-off unpaid bills to "bad debt". Almost all of the bad debt theybwrite off comes from "self-pay" I.e. the uninsured. Hospitals deliberately have very high "self-pay" rates so they can write off the most bad debt possible.

So the "price" for gauze for an uninsured (self-pay) patient may be $30 but the price negotiated with BC/BS for example is probably more like $10 or $15.

This is why (in this model) it is so important to have insurance. Hospitals assume you're not going to pay if you have no insurance so they jacknip the prices.

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No it's pretty much the only reason. The healthcare industrial complex is nothing but a bunch of criminals. They're going to bring the whole country down with the price gouging horse shite. frick em.

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Actually Hospitals have a hard time making money because so many people skip out on their bills. So, like every other business they raise their prices on things to get money from people who can afford to pay. People with insurance make up money for people who skip. Now that deductibles are so high, more people are skipping and can't afford to pay.

My premium for insurance in $675 a month...for just me. I have a $6,000 deductible. That means I have to spend $14,000 in a years time before I get any benefit from my insurance. Yet, the left thinks everything is better because everybody has insurance. Never mind the poor can't use it because they can't afford the deductible.

Should a hospital charge the same amount for identical surgery on two different people? Say two people go in for triple bypass, one surgery lasts 4 hours and goes smoothly, the other takes 6.5 hours with complications requiring more staff and equipment. Hard to pre-itemize healthcare.

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If somebody cannot afford the $30 for a gauze pad, how are they going to afford the $6,000 deductible? The left just doesn't get it. Insurance means nothing if you can't use

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This is why the mandate is a good idea IMO. You can't always control when you require healthcare. And we're not going to just let people die because they can't afford to be treated.

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If the concern is total out of pocket expenses for the consumer, we are heading in a direction where the opposite is scheduled to take place.

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It's not the concern. High deductible plans are essential IMO to driving down costs because it makes people more interested in controllling their own costs.

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“There are many reasons why more patients are struggling to make their healthcare payments in full, the most prominent of which are higher deductibles and the increase in patient responsibility from 10% to 30% over the last few years,”

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Don't forget the skyrocketing premiums. You still have to shell that out every month while also paying your much higher deductible and coinsurance.

Pre-ACA when affordable plans were legal, you could use the savings on your premium to pay your share of the bill and be done with it in a month or two.

Patient responsibility receivables have always had poor payment. The provider expects most of it to be written off. Lenders won't allow it as collateral. The industry make profit off the insurance claims alone and anything they get from patients is pure gravy.

The billing is based on what the most generous insurers may pay; it has nothing to do with cost of performing the service.

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You can talk about unethical practices all you'd like. The pharma companies self-regulate the hell out of rep/doctor interactions. Every dollar is accounted for. There's no "entertaining." There's limited speaking fees compared to even 10 years ago. And doctors don't care about a nice steak dinner. They can buy that themselves. They're not going to write a product over another because of a steak from Morton's.

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Would owning copious amounts of stock in a pharmaceutical company whose product you write prescriptions for be unethical? If not the doctor, then his wife, brother-in-law, cousin etc.? Just curious as I would be willing to bet it occurs. To me, that's more sinister than the 1995 stuff.

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As if anybody could actually pay $85,000 for a short, fairly common surgery, and as if it actually cost that much.

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Most of you are so ignorant about this topic it makes my head hurt. Congrats to the808bass for being the only informed person in the thread.

I worked for a healthcare company that staffed/managed ED's across the country for several years. My job was to literally analyze patient/third party insurance payments every day and predict future revenue per patient broken out by payer class by facility. I was responsible for over 50 separate facilities.

Hospitals know exactly what actual payment they will get based on demographics and insurance companies/CMS know exactly what they will pay. What price would you charge for a broken ankle surgery if the actual cost to the hospital was $8.5k but you knew you will only get 10% of what you charge?

Also, spoiler alert - most people don't pay their medical bills. Our company wrote of tens of millions in bad debt PER MONTH. Most facilities average anywhere from $125-$250 dollars per patient when you factor in what medicare/medicaid pay, write offs, self pay patients that you know will never pay a dime, and insurance/third party disputes. The system is terrible and the main problem is the two decisions makers in a hospital transaction (doctor and patient) are not the ones making decisions on third party reimbursement levels.

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This is why the mandate is a good idea IMO.

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I understand from a practical standpoint...but I just don't see it from a legality standpoint.

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You can't always control when you require healthcare. And we're not going to just let people die because they can't afford to be treated.

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I have no problem with people choosing NOT to have health insurance. that is their choice. However, if they go into the hospital with a serious illness, they should have to pay the consequences financially.
The truly poor that cannot afford? medicaid.

My problem with Medicaid and welfare and other entitlements is not the program themselves, so much as the waste and corruption attached to them. Put more people on to police that people that get it really do need it, and I think the extra people would pay for themselves.