What’s the difference what the cost is?
$500, $150, whatever it is she’s going to pay all of it and every cent up to the $4,500 if, as will probably be the case, she needs more medical attention and follow up treatment after the radiology.
Of course, under any health insurance product, she was going to pay a lot more than the cost of the x-ray, either through high premiums, or high deductibles.
People don’t realize health insurance is just spreading out the cost of catastrophic care. Which means if you have treatment that everybody would get, it is built into the cost of the insurance.
So when the democrats kept throwing things in as “free preventative treatments”, what they were really doing is trying to force everybody to get those treatments, since the insurance company was going to price that into every policy.
So if you buy insurance, you are going to pay the total cost of every “preventative” treatment you can get in a year, PLUS your part of the risk cost for catastrophic care.
And because preventative care is always “free” under every plan, even the cheap high-deductible insurance is really costly.
If you really wanted cheap insurance, you’d buy JUST the catastrophic coverage, put aside $10,000 to cover regular office visits and small issues, and do everything in your power to stay healthy and take care of your own minor illnesses (or find cheap practitioner-type service as a screening tool).
But you can’t do this anymore. Because Obama doesn’t think that is smart. Even though it is the smartest way to handle the health care industry — it would lead to better competition and more self-control in use of the services.