OT: Medical Expense

My complaint is that people want to force their dysfunction on me,
come into my house, my private records and affairs, and run my
health and finances too.

The bureaucratic inefficiency is just a fringe benefit.

Cheers,
James

 

[T]

In article <l8qoe4$25b$1@speranza.aioe.org>, miso@sushi.com says...

On 12/17/2013 4:03 AM, Phil Hobbs wrote:

It's certainly annoying, and maybe excessive, but the amount of agita
they get from an insurance company is probably a lot less than they
would from a collection of retail customers, especially uninsured ones.

(Another example of charging more to the people who actually pay, to
make up for the ones that don't.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs


I don't have dental insurance, so I get a cash discount. But I have no
clue if the schmuck price with discount is cheaper than the insurance
price. The problem is I have seen people with dental insurance having to
go to the dentist more times that I think is required, just to get more
things to bill.

In the past two years, I would have made money on the insurance. One
root canal, one crown, and a freakin' dental implant. But perhaps the
insurance company would put out a hit contract on me if I cost them
money. They are no different than organized crime.

Most dental benefits are limited to about $1,500 per year. That's why
every time I had to have work done I'd schedule it for November or so -
we'd use up the $1,500 and in January if there was mor work to be done
do it then.

 

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 07:52:51 -0800 (PST),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Thursday, December 19, 2013 11:25:36 PM UTC-5, k...@attt.bizz wrote:


Bullshit. If you want to redefine "real insurance" as having paid

breast pumps and birth control pills, maybe not. Under any other

definition they were just as much "real insurance" as what Obamacare

is pushing. It's so nice of you to protect people from themselves,

whether they want it or not.

Those kinds of things were factored into your previous premiums whether you know or not.

You're lying again.

 

On Thursday, December 19, 2013 10:57:59 PM UTC-5, bloggs.fred...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 9:54:49 PM UTC-5, Phil Hobbs wrote:

Which I gather is your rationalization for the train wreck that
Osamacare has made of the health insurance of millions of people.

Those people had no real insurance, many things not covered, high deductibles, unrealistic lifetime limits and in some cases dropped once they develop expensive chronic illness. PPACA eliminated that charade. You might get a clue and notice that the people who always had reasonably good insurance are having no problems whatsoever, their policy coverage and rates remain unchanged. Their policies were always compliant with PPACA minimums. It's only the gamblers who lost. Then the freeloaders trying to coast through life with no insurance until they get older and ill, the gravy train is up for them, as it should be, you can't make insurance ( a pooled risk) work with vermin like that. The U.S. is a vermin filled cesspool, the vermin will just do as they're told or go to jail.

Obamacare, supposedly to protect us from rescission, is the
greatest mass rescission in human history.

People are going to die because of this. Sick people, desperate people.
Lots of them. People whose plans were fine, who liked what they had
and thought they could keep it.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579171710423780446

James

 

On Thursday, December 19, 2013 10:57:57 PM UTC-5, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Friday, 20 December 2013 04:11:25 UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 11:13:26 PM UTC-5, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, 18 December 2013 01:21:40 UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, December 16, 2013 8:08:08 PM UTC-5, P E Schoen wrote:

Same here. I have $2600 deductible, followed by 80/20 up to $5800 max yearly, and essentially 100% after that. I have an HSA so I can put the deductible in it tax free.

The combo of HSAs and major medical policies would let people save and pay for ordinary medical expense, would encourage competition and frugal consuming, and cover disasters. That removes the middlemen for most transactions too, saving tons of paperwork, time, labor, and cost.

Obamacare pretty well outlaws all the above.

From what I gathered from my romp through the healthcare.gov site to the MD site I should be able to get as good or better for about half of the $430/month I pay now,

O-care costs more.

In large part because it offers better cover - for pre-existing conditions amongst other things.

If your premium is lower it's because you're getting the welfare payments. It's a sad statement when Obama thinks engineers need welfare, and that subsidies make something "affordable" rather than more expensive in the long run.

If engineers get the wrong disease, they need "welfare" too.

They don't need welfare. We buy insurance or save for such things. Or not. It's a choice.

"Welfare" is merely mutual insurance. The government is acting as insurer of last resort.

In the same way the Mafia is the insurer of first resort--forcing
people to buy something they don't need or want, for an inflated
price.

Healthcare is about insurance, and the wrong disease isn't "affordable" for anybody.

Insurance is a way to give doctors fake pieces of paper after you're already sick, and support a bunch of other paperwork that does nothing useful.. It has almost nothing to do with health.

That depends on your insurer. Sensible insurers encourage you to get tested so that diseases are found early, when they can be treated more cheaply and more effectively.

If it made sense financially, it's far cheaper to pay directly instead of
hiring middlemen and busybodies to do it for you. They also burden the
doctor, increasing her charges.

SCENARIO #1: Colloquy with doctor, with staff, with insurance,
what's covered, what isn't, what are the payments and co-pays,
paperwork filed and coded, etc.

SCENARIO #2: "Here's your money, doc."

Using insurance as a bill-paying service isn't sensible at all.

Would you save money on toilet paper--a vital necessity (possibly
even a human right)--by buying toilet paper insurance, paying
toilet paper insurance agents, filing claims, and haggling over
co-pays? How much time and money would you expect to save?

The point was that the Affordable Care Act's mechanism assumes even the highest-earners--engineers--can't afford ACA premiums without sponging off someone else.

Insurance always means "sponging off someone else" if you need it. Everybody else's premiums pay for the reconstruction of your house if it burns down.

Therefore $10,000 a month would be reasonable for auto insurance for
the best drivers, if Obamacare said so?

Insurance is paying for your share of a risk. Charging young people
five times the cost of their average annual risk isn't insurance.
The "left" was calling less than half that an "outrageous profit,"
previously where private companies did it, but now argue that
double under Obamacare is their "fair share."

If the highest-earners have to sponge off others to afford it, who is everyone else supposed to sponge off of? Are we all supposed to steal our O-care from each other? To make it affordable?

I think you've failed to understand how insurance works.

As I understand your explanation--
you invent a bogus scenario, magnanimously promise to save everyone
from it with their own money, claim you're doing them a favor, then
use that excuse to take however much of their property you deem vital,
to spend on others. And it's okay, because you call it "insurance."

E.g., we need to tax you mightily, lest you die and leave your children on
public support. That you don't have any kids is unimportant. Besides,
you're benefitting from other people's hard work raising their kids--you're
freloading. That suffices.

So, we need to grab at least 10% of your income to set aside for that.
Ditto for food. And clothing. And education. And shoes--the shoemakers
insist. Pencils. And everything else.

We need a government that takes everything you produce and redistributes it
more sensibly.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't look as it is working to you. If your ideological blinkers didn't blind you to reality quite so effectively, you might do better.

Ideas and logic are indeed blinkers compared to magical thinking.
If you can show mathemagically how, on average, everyone can
subsidize everyone else and increase the common stock--and how
it's not a shell game that increases cost and wastes the common
good--the Nobel Over-unity Prize committee awaits.

But since you're saying it's okay to overcharge people for unnecessary insurance, one assumes you'll guarantee it isn't for nought. You are willing to promise their spending <even more money> will cure them of <whatever>, right?

This has to be one your sillier straw man arguments. Since I regularly point out that US medical care costs half again more than it ought to, the proponent of over-charging has to be you.

IOW, if x is unaffordable, and Obamacare >> x, Obamacare is better than x. Got it.

And yes, you guarantee them much better health, in exchange for their
mandatorily increased premiums. That you've previously said American
health care already costs too much is irrelevant.

Remember, ObamaCare is not insurance. It just offers a choice among several providers and sets minimum standards and affordable prices.

Obamacare is a federal takeover of insurance by brain-dead federal bureaucrats, turning insurance companies into brain-dead feds.

Which is the way similar systems work in other advanced industrial countries, where they offer rather better health care (as judged by life expectancy and other population wide statistics) to everybody for roughly two thirds of the price per head.

By using lifespan as a proxy, one assumes you're prepared to show that
Europeans have the same demographics as Americans; the same ethnic mix;
are equally sedentary and obese; and have the same number of accidents,
murders, and premature teen births.

I certainly wasn't using lifespan as the only proxy - it's always one of a number of indices.

We all know lifespan isn't a proxy for health care quality, yet you continue to use it.

It's true that no country is exactly the same - and the fact that Americans are exceptionally prone to obesity doesn't increase their average lifespan - but they are uniquely short-lived amongst all the other advanced industrial countries, most of whom come out much the same, despite their various differences in ethnic mix and life-styles.

America does have more murders - 5 per 100,000 - than other advanced industrial countries, at roughly 1 per 100,000 and the difference is pretty much exactly the gun murder rate, but it makes very little difference to the life expectancy.

If lifespan is a proxy for medical systems' efficacy, what can we all assume about the lifespan of Australian aborigines? It must be stellar.

Oh dear, according to this it's 17 years shorter.

http://adiama.com/ancestralconnections/2012/01/28/australia-to-finally-recognize-aborigines-as-first-people/

This is a more reliable source

http://www.aihw.gov.au/indigenous-life-expectancy/

....that gives the same figure.


> My youngest brother - the medico - is an expert in this area and lectures on it from time to time. About half his patients are indigenous people. As the government web-site points out, this isn't a uniquely Australian problem.

But it's uniquely bad in Australia, so, if Australia were America,
you'd say the health care must be particularly poor. (In fact
that's exactly what you've said, over and over.)

> What it doesn't point out is that Australia indigenous culture was Old Stone Age, rather than the New Stone Age cultures of Canada and New Zealand. New Stone Age cultures live in larger communities than hunter-gatherers and have evolved better defenses against infectious diseases and other problems.

In America, using a theory of genetic superiority to rationalize poor
medical outcomes would be considered the very definition of "racist."

While making that excuse for the plight of the handful of Australia's
non-exterminated aboriginal survivors, you ignore that America is 12-13%
black. For various reasons including but not limited to high rates of
obesity, teen births, and violence, large parts of that population
don't live as long as others.

We have very large minorities of other peoples too.

We have perhaps a couple million infected with HIV. We have an
infamously large cohort who are morbidly obese, and who are
diabetic. And, our poor black population has a world-leading
rate of high-risk teen pregnancy, premature births, and infant
deaths.

Please explain again why these don't matter and the differences in your
97% homogenous population are all due to your superior medical care.


Cheers,

James Arthur