Here are a couple of train stations:
Posted on 01/22/2013 6:54:21 PM PST by Lorianne
•Hu Songwen built his machine after he could no longer afford hospital bills
•He said two of his friends had died after building and using similar machines
•Offered Government medical aid after story went national, but says nearest hospital is too far away and too crowded
Three times a week, Hu Songwen sits on a small toilet in his home in a rural east China town and fires up his homemade dialysis machine.
Hu, who suffers from kidney disease, made it from kitchen utensils and old medical instruments after he could no long afford hospital fees.
He was a college student when he was diagnosed in 1993 with kidney disease, which means waste products cannot be removed from his blood.
He underwent dialysis treatment in hospital but ran out of savings after six years. His solution was to create his own machine to slash his costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
That may be just the stuff they export.
>>but you will have to still pay the ‘Obamacare’ tax on your machine!
Except, per the O-Newspeak Dictionary 2013 edition, it’s not a tax but a home-healthcare surcharge.
Citizens please take note.
Costello: Hu built that?
Abbott: No, he’s on first.
I understand that roughly 2/3 of all Medicare expenditures are in support of dialysis patients.
1. Based on what you know about the billing for your dialysis, would you say that the charges are appropriate for the service provided?
2. Do you do anything special to pass the time while hooked up?
3. Have you ever considered a kidney transplant?
Here are a couple of train stations:
I note that the bills are settled for approximately 33-50% of the amount billed. Which tells me that, as Medicare reduces their payments to medical suppliers, the suppliers increase their billed costs so as to receive an appropriate amount for their services.
Which is to say that any future "savings" in Medicare predicated on "reduced payments to suppliers" will be a fiction.
The service costs what it costs. And a profit is earned from rendering the service. The current (and any future) Medicare payment schedule is designed to mask all of this.
2. Do you do anything special to pass the time while hooked up?
I intentionally take treatment on the first shift -- starting at 5:30 AM. That way, I spend my time in the chair sleeping and when I come out of the chair around 9:30, I've still got a full day in front of me.
3. Have you ever considered a kidney transplant?
I am now 73 yrs old. And dialysis is a very benign experience for me, while some struggle with and are weakened by the treatments. My view is that, as the equivalent of a '76 Buick up on blocks and leaking oil, I'd prefer the replacement kidneys go to somebody who needs them more than I do.
You didn't ask, but there is also a home dialysis treatment that is available. One plugs into a machine (which is portable) every night via an access in the abdomen. That form of treatment is not available to me due to the scar tissue I have from cancer surgery in 1989.
SPeaking of Death Panels, Obama just appointed someone today to head up a commions on new and alternative “end of life” treatment options
I am NOT making this up
Awhile ago this story was posted on FR about the Chinese guy that built his own prosthetic arms. Got to hand it to these Chinese guys!
no. am i missing your point?
i am just saying a cyano-acrylate is not surgical glue, which is far more safe biologically for the body. they may both hold well, but they are two different animals.
Third worlders don’t have a choice and under ObamaKKKare none of us will have a choice either.
Dialysis works through a process called osmosis, not diffusion. For the DIY’rs.
well yeah, i agree with you on that.
Figured you weren’t.
I think this is pretty typical for all insurers now. All insurance companies have negotiated rates with all of the doctors and facilities in their "preferred provider" networks. Anyone without insurance or from another network or who doesn't have the particular procedure covered is charged much more. Perhaps Medicare pays even less than most insurers.
The thing that is hard to understand is how there could be enough uninsured people with income or assets to shift the costs to.
I recently saw a case where some medical tests were paid by an insurance company at 10% of the billed amount and the lab accepted this. The amount paid seemed low. But the billed amount was vastly higher than one could buy the tests for from an independent supplier on the Internet. This tells me that it really does not cost a lot to run many medical lab tests and there is a lot of overcharging and cost-shifting going on in this area.
It tells me that, as with every other market that the federal government has entered, they have managed to pervert it -- destroying the relationship between cost and price.
The identical thing has happened in higher education, where tuition costs have risen so as to soak up every federal dollar available.
And, famously, the mortgage market -- where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac managed to not only destroy the relationship between cost and price, they managed to destroy the entire market.
Yet, our political elite cannot keep their hands off the free market -- they are hell-bent on de-constructing the source of our prosperity.
It seems to me that it's not only the Federal government. As long as people have insurance that pays a lot of their medical bills, they are less focused on price than they would be with many other purchases. Also the whole medical system seems to discourage shopping around and price competition.
Of course it can be difficult for a lay person to determine the tradeoff between quality and price in a medical setting.
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