If you have an exorbitantly expensive medicine that is covered under Medicare Part D (extremely, extremely likely), then you will face something called Medicare Part D catastrophic coverage. One should especially look into the data on that.
It is really easy to be in the Medicare Part D catastrophic coverage situation. Even if you are sitting on a mountain of cash during retirement, it is profoundly wasteful to be paying anywhere from $20,000/year-$100,000/year for your medicine, which is usually a lifesaving medicine, and is life or death, whether you take it or not.
Not to mention: The third leading cause of death in the United States in preventable medical errors. If you do not believe me then Google it. When a country has the third leading cause of death as preventable medical errors, they are almost always developing or third world countries. But, the US is an anomaly in that respect.
You can go the the best hospitals and the best doctors in the United States, but you cannot evade a statistic like that. When that statistic is so high, these issues are so pervasive that they are definitely present in a completely unacceptable way, even with the best institutions, hospitals and doctors in the United States.
If one was smart, they would investigate this further and decide to leave. Europe, especially West and Northern Europe, should be places one should by vying for. But anywhere in the European Union typically will be a step up from this chaos of a system.
I googled it. The third leading cause of death is 'accidents.' Where are you seeing 'preventable medical errors'?
There has been a lot of research done about it. It would be foolish to underestimate the scale of the problem.
Also, if you are concerned about getting the best possible care, or even just staying alive long-term, one should spend a lot of time examining http://healthdata.org
Life expectancy can be a good start when it comes to just investigating things.
The research from this site is very solid and all of it is open access. It was funded partly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation too. A lot of this research comes from the University of Washington. They have a remarkable statistics department in general. They also have an phenomenal medical school. In terms of public medical schools, it is by far one of the best. Only UCLA and UCSF compete with it. Their allied health programs are great too.
If you live in Seattle, the care tends to be fairly consistent. Anyways, I am basically affirming my allegiance to UW Medical School. They kept my grandmother alive for many more years than what we would have ever expected.
Anyways, you can bet on it that their research is solid, even though I have deep respect for UW Medical School.
You are correct. It took her two years of study (with full time job) to pass her medical coder exam, and she's only really an expert in her area of expertise. There are dozens of areas of expertise. It is virtually impossible to navigate the system without an insider to assist.
The fact that providers can perform services on you without telling you up-front what the price will be is the problem. That isn’t how a lot of the rest of our capitalist society works - Amazon can’t raise the price of something I order from them after it’s shipped to me, my rent can’t change once I sign the lease contract which clearly states the charges up front, and so on...
Of course. In an unregulated for-profit health care system that is definitely the problem and the way we got there was because of; if there are multiple vendors then prices will automatically go down.
I'm not anti-capitalism. It just doesn't work for certain parts of society but it seems that in the US everything needs to be capitalised and the government clearly doesn't want to regulate this industry.
FTA: “In a feeble attempt to ameliorate the problem, Congress passed the Notice Act in 2015, which requires hospitals to inform patients of the implications of their observation status within 36 hours after observation services have been initiated. In other words, hospitals must advise patients of their observation status only after they have already incurred the expense of surgery and hospitalization.”
This type of thing seems like the most immediate problem. It makes no sense that the price can be raised 36 hours after a procedure has already begun. How is anyone supposed to negotiate that properly?
Just saying, I don’t think “capitalism” is necessarily the boogeyman here. The government itself is failing to negotiate properly with the providers when running its socialist healthcare system in this instance. (And non-government payers will run into the same problems, getting unfair bills that couldn’t be anticipated or negotiated before agreeing to the service)
Any market where the buyer is not the person who’s paying, or where the buyer has to make a purchasing decision before they know the price (or even what goods/services they’re agreeing to buy), cannot possibly be influenced by the laws of supply and demand. It’s the same reason that you can look at essentially any government spending project, and amaze yourself by how little the government manages to achieve with so much money. The payer doesn’t have any choice about how much taxes they pay, and the decision maker has a very poorly constrained supply of other people’s money to spend.
Perhaps the real issue is the lack of capitalist principles? Perhaps the issue is CMS trying to micromanage everything via billing in a very centrally planned manner?
I think its interesting that the areas of the economy with the most government intervention are doing the worst... Healthcare, education, housing...etc. You could even throw in ISPs with their government guaranteed monopolies.
Meanwhile tech had basically no regulation. What do we see? Many things are free (yes even to the poor! Without a government guarantee or people going around proclaiming that it is a human right! Insane!). The industry also has some of the highest paid (no tech minimum wage to bring it about, insane!) and best treated workers...
I think it's the opposite–yes, the government does allow this sort of behaviour, but that's because the health-care-adjacent parasites lobby so furiously against any efforts to stop it. It's scarcely the government stepping in to ensure this sort of banditry (why would they, when government officials don't benefit from it?).
What?