The article says funding for Medicaid will be reduced. I thought that OCare was structured so that the feds would pay for the increase in Medicaid expenses at first, but that each year thereafter, the fed’s share would go down 10% til the states had absorbed the increase?
And the article said that without insurance, people could rack up thousands in bills very quickly. A lot of those programs have deductibles in the thousands. So they still can rack up thousands of dollars in bills....
And tbh, it seems like they are trying to figure out how to get people covered by health insurance. But none of them seems to be looking at the root causes of the increases in costs for medical care; so they are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Yes, people can rack up thousands of dollars in healthcare bills overnight, literally.
I have been thinking about all this ‘healthcare and insurance’ stuff lately. Trying very hard to step out of the current dysfunctional view and get something fresh.
A very disturbing thing I noticed was when the orthopedist bill arrived the other day...they billed me $545 for the aircast walking boot. I located the exact same boot, exact same boot brand new on Amazon for under $150. So, what truly justifies the orthopedist office charging $545 for an item they surely buy in bulk at a discount? The doctor charged $350 to look at my digital x-ray and determine the aircast was appropriate treatment. A physical therapist “fit” me for the small boot and instructed me on how to use it. Funny, I could have read the directions and ordered the $150 boot from Amazon. I won’t even get into the crazy billing from the trip to the ER several nights earlier.
The medical field has a captive consumer with often critical needs. Yes, these are ‘needs’ and not luxury wants like that fancy car parked next to me in the ER lot or the latest botox injection. Nobody wants to pay for someone else’s care, but we all do somewhere along the way.
Are we trying to ‘fix’ the wrong thing? I am beginning to strongly consider the premise that fixing health insurance is the contradiction. Healthcare has become so grossly expensive as to even make reasonable people unable to afford basic insurance. When doctors can gouge patients for products available in the market place because they have a captive consumer, something is evil in the system.
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
The answer isn’t going to be found in health insurance rules, regulations, or requirements. The health care field has priced itself out of the market. Unfortunately, like so many other things in modern life like electricity, heat, healthcare is a critical necessity to the modern infrastructure of life. We do have to find a way to provide it at a reasonable cost to all of us.
My guess is that what the feds started to cover was the full cost of those additionally put on the rolls with the expansion, and that that was scheduled to decline over time. However, I think the expansion still created many more people for the feds to provide their share of the costs on after the full funding to the states had receded.
wife was having a baby and shopped for a plan to take effect Jan 1.....so knowing the baby was coming chose the lowest out of pocket one available. And now the baby is here as he was just born. $440 bucks for just her....no dental. Or $750 for mom and baby with dental. Dental must now be included.....must because all children, must have it. Even newborns. So much for choice. I chose a plan with a low out of pocket considering the life event that was happening. The deductible is $1750 per, x2 ppl for the policy and and out of pocket max of $3500 per, x2 ppl.
So I pay $9000 a year and soak up the first $3,500 in medical expenses, with some minor exceptions. Such as getting a prescription filled, will kick in I believe before I reach the deductible. After the deductible is reached I have a co-pay of 20% until a total of $7,000 out of pocket is reached.
So in a nutshell I have to pay the first $12,500 before the insurer starts shouldering the costs in a meaningful way. And in this instance, will have to pay $16,000 this year.
That’s just for mom and the baby. I can’t afford insurance.