As I saw this woman last week in a convenience store where I had stopped to get gas. She told the clerk that she could not afford health insurance because it cost too much but she bought two cartons of cigs and two cases of beer and I said that was enough to pay for health insurance and almost got my head handed to me. Most are uninsured because they want to be and there is NO hospital that will turn away a patient whether they have insurance or not. So we have a vast number who are riding the horse of the tax paying public for their medical care. There are NO uninsured in the United States.
Yes, many ILLEGALs and others use the ER for health care but many other people who don't have insurance pay their own way. Get your facts straight and stop using your emotions and "heresay" when you post.
Do you know how hospitals gouge them? They will charge $5,000 for a simple procedure ... the same procedure they will bill an insurer a couple of hundred dollars for ... so that one paying customer ends up paying for dozens of other uninsured folks to end up having the procedure for free.
This should be criminalized. The hospitals know they cannot turn away indigent patients and that those patients will not pay them. So they extort it from the folks who do pay their own way.
I am sure this will only grow worse in time.
That's true for most young people who are healthy, a decent catastrophic plan will only run you about what your cable bill costs. However there are a decent amount of people who do work full time and make about 100-150% the FPL who happen to have developed an illness like say diabetes. Now there premium just went from around the cable bill to around say the rent. For about at least 1 in 5 of the uninsured the choice is rent or insurance. The other 75% are either twenty and thirty somethings who think nothing bad will ever happen to them so why piss $80 bucks down the drain or they are children of parents who are to cheap or irresponsible to buy them coverage in which children are the cheapest to insure.
True. But after they admit him, then they will bill him for the full price of his treatment. All the doctors who treated him at the hospital (even those he never saw, like the pathologist, the radiologist, and the CRNA) will send him ginormous bills too. And if he can't pay them they will all take him to court and obtain a six-figure judgment against him. Of course, if he has a pre-existing condition he might not have been able to obtain health insurance at any price prior to this disaster, and he certainly won't be able to afterward.
And rightly so, I might add.
Last time I checked (about four years ago), it would cost me over $1000 a month to insure me and my family (wife & 1 child).
I know the price of cigarettes has gone up, but I doubt it's THAT much.
In the four years I've been self-employed, I've saved about $50,000.
When my wife needed wrist surgery, we found the price to be around $5000. When the bill came, they found out we were paying cash, they knocked it down to about $3000.
Don't assume that just because you check off the 30 bucks a month on your pay stub, that everyone is in the same boat.