Healthcare for those who can afford it
By“Hi, Tom. When did you get back in town? Your regular table is available. Can I get you a Guinness?”
It’s a creaky little pub at the edge of downtown Charlotte where, well, everybody knows your name. In a town filled with prefab, coming in for dinner is like coming home.
“Linda” is one of the regular waitresses and hadn’t seen me in a couple of months. The first thing she wanted to tell me was that she had finally scheduled a surgery to remove the lump on the right side of her neck. It’s been growing since we met in August last year, but with little money and no insurance, she’s been unable to do anything about it. The lump is now about the size of a small potato and making her jawline disappear.
She didn’t say how much the surgery might cost, but it almost cost her several thousand dollars more. The clinic told her that this type of surgery was usually done on Fridays. Being a waitress, that wasn’t her best financial strategy. They told Linda she could move it to Monday and she jumped at the idea. Only after asking did she find out it would cost a couple thousand dollars more to get the surgery done on Monday. She stayed with Friday.
No one at the clinic offered that information up front. “If I hadn’t asked,” Linda said, sounding exasperated, “I would have paid all that money extra. It would be like me serving you beer in a bottle without telling you that you could get the same beer for less on draft.”
As is, Linda will be making payments on the surgery for — she doesn’t know for how long.
“The best health care system in the world,” for those who can afford it.
10 Comments
March 4th, 2010 at 8:13 am
With “official” unemployment at just under 10% (BLS U-3), adding the under-employed (U-6) at over 16%, and including those who have given up looking (removed from BLS statistics in 1994) estimated at over 20% and price inflation due to massive monetary inflation due to decrease the dollar’s purchasing power, are government health care mandates really sustainable? Current obligations of the US are approaching 100 trillion dollars, good paying jobs gone forever for many Americans, additional health care insurance mandates will greatly decrease income for everyone now struggling to get by. If we all only owned insurance companies with a customers forced to purchase our “product” we would be greatly benefiting from this boondoggle.
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March 4th, 2010 at 8:53 am
Tom,
I’ve got stories as well. The woman who had a stroke, lost her job, lost her insurance, and is now forgoing treatment. The man who injured his back at work, became unable to to his job anymore, lost his insurance, and now forgoes treatment for several other maladies.
Single payer would solve all of this. A public option would get us a long way. Some would rather us forget that there are human lives attached to those dollar signs.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
To repeat… people who do NOT work, pay rent from their own earnings or pay mortgages, buy cars, etc., can go to the E.R. for non-emergency routine medical care at extremely high cost with complete impunity – they have nothing to lose. Construction workers, waitresses, beauticians, part-time employees, temporary workers and the list goes on, are pretty much left out of the “safety net.”
While I’m on the subject, hospitals charge less for the insured than they do for the self-pay un-insured (like Linda cited in the example). I’m guessing that Linda’s procedure was done outpatient and very likely in a physician owned facility. I say this simply because it is almost impossible to get cost information from a hospital – try it some time. Personally, I’m convinced that if the price is a secret, something is very odd about the pricing structure.
MANDATORY single payer would make a positive difference by putting the healthy into the money pool and demanding contribution from those who currently milk the system. Based on my 42 years of working life with very good employer based insurance, some folks seek medical treatment all the time and most people seek medical treatment only when really needed. I don’t think those tendencies would change with single payer.
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March 5th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Can someone tell me why it is more expensive on a Monday than a Friday for presumably the same procedure?
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March 5th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
I’ve been in the health care trenches for 25 years… Ours is no longer a “1st world” system — at least not for a very large minority of our population (perhaps a majority if the under-insured are counted).
Ask Kay Hagan why she won’t join 35 other senators in supporting the public option, http://hagan.senate.gov/contact/
Will someone remind we why we elect Democrats if they act like advocates for Big Insurance and Big Pharma rather than advocates for their constituents?
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March 5th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
@Anne: Because progressives don’t vote their conscience. It’s the myth of the wasted vote.
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March 5th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
brainshrub,
The biggest hook to still pull the lever for national Dems is the Supreme Court…other than that….it’s getting harder and harder to believe that they represent their constituents interests vs big biz.
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March 6th, 2010 at 10:20 am
Anne,
When you see the Democrats working so hard on the legislative and executive fronts for corporate and financial interests instead of for us, it’s difficult to believe that their Supreme Court picks will be much different.
I think it’s time to realize that both parties at the national level are hopelessly compromised. We have to go third-party, or better yet, NO party.(Once you become an “organization”, you’re easier to manipulate. Just look at the “Tea Party”- what could have been an organic coming-together of fed-up citizens that reached across a lot of divides was quickly named and “organized” by talk show hosts and out-of-power politicians into just another flock of sheep chanting meaningless slogans, convinced that some “other” Americans are their enemies.)
I’m encouraged by all the insightful comments on this thread. At some point, we’re gonna have to take it to the streets.
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March 7th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
to the streets indeed.
Universal single payer works everywhere it is applied.
Sure, there are problems and hiccups and some pissed off folks.
But, any system has problems and hiccups and pissed off folks. The only meaningful question is “what works best?”
Universal single payer works everywhere it is applied.
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March 8th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
@Cecil:
It doesn’t work in imaginary libertarian-land. So there!
Also, the doctrine of American Exceptionalism states that whatever works in the rest of the world does not apply here.
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