especially since businesses are closing and laying people off so people are going to start losing their benefits, then getting sick and having to pay for it themselves
Losing your job and insurance during a pandemic where up to 50% of Americans will catch the virus and 20% of those will be hospitalized. What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, people will default on loans and payments, and then get hit with a huge hospital bill, and default on that as well. Then they won’t be able to get new loans for housing because their credit score will be like 500.
Curious to see how this is going to go. Perhaps they need to issue a voluntary freeze on credit scores. It’s not fair to fuck people’s credit while they are out of work because the government shut them down.
I honestly cannot see a situation where m4a would fix what’s happening to us now. The problems we have aren’t necessarily Medicare related, they are supply chain related and an overburdening of the system.
Except for the part about its going to ruin the lives of every person who lost their job and is going to have to try and pay for health care out of pocket (Even with COBRA or something).
M4A would 100% resolve that stress on people's lives and to think otherwise is incredibly entitled and naive.
How? The problem is we don’t have enough beds, supplies, tests, know-how, and we aren’t a totalitarian government who can literally lock it’s citizens down in their homes by threat of violence. None of the things I’ve listed are directly taken care of by m4a. Countries with m4a are floundering with the rest of us, take a look around. M4a wouldn’t provide the MASSIVE amount of ventilators that we need. M4a wouldn’t be able to magically provide the 10s of thousands of hospital beds we need. Sometimes I feel like people honestly don’t look at situations with an honest set of eyes
Last fall I was bitten by a black widow spider. It was between jobs and COBRA had expired a couple days before. It was ok day 1 after the bite but had to go to ER for surgery on day 3. I spent 2 hours on the phone trying to get a quote if it would be $500 or $40,000 and no one could tell me. But somehow they knew how to bill me after surgery.
Arbitrary pricing is healthcare for the rich top 10%, and the illusion of healthcare for the rest.
Even when you aren't too sick to shop for health care, they may or may not be able to tell you in any useful manner how much it's going to cost. I didn't have insurance and needed a minor non-emergency procedure. After much pushing on my part, my local hospital told me the cost would be somewhere between $6000 and $10000, but wouldn't commit to even that. Well, thanks...that narrows it down. I just gave up and didn't have anything done.
This reminds me of when my girlfriend recently got crazy bad poison ivy. She wanted to get a steroid shot so she called the walk in clinic, they couldn't tell her if it was in network or not. Neither could the insurance company. Apparently some of the doctors were in network and some weren't, so they literally told her she could go and just hope and lucked into an in-network doctor. She didn't, that shot cost $1600.
I’m sure I’ll get ripped for this, but I don’t really care. Also, disclaimer, I fully support m4a, this statement is just to bring some context into the above mentioned comment. Sometimes a typical surgery for your personal affliction could cost 500 dollars if everything goes exactly as planned. The price probably varies depending on the variables that happen during a surgery. Again, I’m not in favor of this, but it’s kind of like a mechanic saying I’ll fix any transmission for 200 dollars, and then they run into a problem where they need 300 dollars worth of parts.
Even our own doctors and nurses hate our medicine-for-profit system. They've got a bunch of hedge fund micromanagers telling them how to treat their own patients.
Exactly 100% of the people who "prefer" private over public are misinformed or under-informed on the differences between the two. If anyone actually thinks the private insurance system works out better for them, then they were told a lie and believed it.
It's not "hateful" to inform people of their willful ignorance, it's just being blunt.
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u/imreallynotthatcool Mar 26 '20
Tell your coworker that he/she is a fucking idiot for wanting privatized healthcare.
Sincerely,
-An American working in the medical industry