Originally Posted by sonatine
This administration is embarrassing on so many levels.
This administration is embarrassing on so many levels.
people voted for a reality show instead of a government.
hows that working out?
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
call in and read this to Druff
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1249138171117539328
someone remind me what political party the gov of florida belongs to please?
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
This is incorrect.Mumbles answered, "Declare bankruptcy", but he's wrong.
First off, with very few exceptions, there's no excuse to be uninsured in this country now. Everyone who is too poor to get it receives a subsidy, sometimes as high as 100%. Master Scalir, for example, has a $0 Obamacare plan. Those without insurance in the US in 2020 are either too lazy to go through the process to get it, budget their money poorly (that is, they make too much to get a subsidy but waste it on other things), or simply choose not to get it. The latter is actually most of the problem. It's hard for some young and middle-aged people to justify spending several hundred dollars per month per family member when "everyone is healthy" and "none of us are old". That's obviously stupid, but that's how it's happening now. The days of failing to qualify for insurance or being unable to afford it are basically over.
With that said, even if you're uninsured, there's a big myth that the hospital comes and takes your house in the event you have a $100k ER bill and you can't or won't pay.
Not true.
Hospitals are incredibly lax when it comes to bill collection. They'll make a few weak attempts to get the money and send some bills, but that's about it. They usually just eat it. This is why ER bills are so high -- you are paying for all the people who stiffed them!
This is also why hospitals are so willing to negotiate the bill with you. This is also why my early March ER visit saw a 20% discount on my $350 co-pay if I "pay now". They're thrilled when they get any definite money out of you.
Why are hospitals stiffed so often? Because the bills tend to be high, and many who visit realize that it would take an eternity to pay, so they just say fuck it. For example, if you're poor and get a $22,000 bill, there's no way you're breaking this into 220 $100 payments. You're just walking away.
There is a decent chance that, when this is all over, the government will cover a lot of these bills anyway, and tell them to forgive any patients who were treated for COVID-19 with unpaid bills.
When we had our second child the hospital was slow in following their billing protocol. They were told be insurance that we owed around $1200 in deductable and sat on it. Two weeks after he was born he needed to see an ear doctor who billed a bunch and we payed the rest of the deductable off for that. Hospital said hey you owe us $1200. We say no, resubmit. Wife also called hr and had them check into this and they determined it was correct.
A year and a new health insurance provider later I get a knock on the door from a process server. I immediately call hosptial and asked what this was about and they were supposed to resubmit. They told me they couldnt speak to me as it was with the legal team.
Long story short our old insurance was of no help really, their attorney was a dipshit and we ended up having to go to a few court dates to try and sort it out. Judge was like I believe you are right, but ultimately you sign that you are responsible for payment either way when being admitted.
He decided we owe the amount and their attorney asked him if we couldnt pay the balance now he would like wage garnishment.
We paid it that day. These attorneys had dozens of people on the court calender for that hospital group.
Also worth noting this was over $1200. Imagine if it was $40k? You are fucking A right they would go after your paycheck, house, everything if you couldnt pay.
Yeah, but the ratings are thru the fucking roof dude.
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Trump hasn't listened to the experts for years why would he start now?
not so great unfortunately
he a trump backrd republican
shocking
Last edited by big dick; 04-12-2020 at 02:31 AM.
NICE TYPO, FUCKTARD
Hear what Barack Obama said in 2014 about pandemics
How could anyone possibly prefer trump to be handling this over obama. Looking at you druff.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/...k-in-politics/
This is incorrect.
When we had our second child the hospital was slow in following their billing protocol. They were told be insurance that we owed around $1200 in deductable and sat on it. Two weeks after he was born he needed to see an ear doctor who billed a bunch and we payed the rest of the deductable off for that. Hospital said hey you owe us $1200. We say no, resubmit. Wife also called hr and had them check into this and they determined it was correct.
A year and a new health insurance provider later I get a knock on the door from a process server. I immediately call hosptial and asked what this was about and they were supposed to resubmit. They told me they couldnt speak to me as it was with the legal team.
Long story short our old insurance was of no help really, their attorney was a dipshit and we ended up having to go to a few court dates to try and sort it out. Judge was like I believe you are right, but ultimately you sign that you are responsible for payment either way when being admitted.
He decided we owe the amount and their attorney asked him if we couldnt pay the balance now he would like wage garnishment.
We paid it that day. These attorneys had dozens of people on the court calender for that hospital group.Your experience is very atypical.
It looks like you had the bad luck of running into a hospital which probably decided it was worth paying a salaried attorney to work full time to go after people for unpaid medical bills. This is not common at all.
BTW, I didn't fully understand your story, but it sounds like the insurance screwed up, underpaid the hospital $1200, you supposedly got it fixed, and then 18 months later you got served with a lawsuit over that same $1200?
If that's what happened, you could have still collected back from that old insurance company, even if you weren't with them anymore.
Hospitals make people sign a form basically saying, "I agree to pay this bill, even if the insurance fucks you and doesn't pay what you're supposed to."
However, that doesn't let the insurance company off the hook. You can force them to back-pay you if their screwup causes a provider to collect money from you that the insurance should have paid. You can file a grievance with the state if this happens, or you can sue the insurance company (or both).
Anyway, sounds like you got royally fucked there, but you really ran into something uncommon. For example, Master Scalir has stiffed hospitals on their bills time and time again over a period of decades. Never once have they attempted to sue him or aggressively collect. By contrast, one time he defaulted on a payday loan, and they had a lawsuit filed and served within days.
I doubt any hospitals are going to collect COVID-19 bills from individuals. That would be really, really, really bad PR. They might ask the government for assistance in covering those bills, however, and I'd actually agree they deserve it.
its wild to look at this thread and see people arguing about insurance companies, and then i log into twitter and i see multiple posts like this:
https://twitter.com/twt/status/1249107271273111553
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
i would be floored if the attorney was getting paid a flat fee. he was most likely on a contingency. i'm not sure why every hospital wouldn't do this.Your experience is very atypical.
It looks like you had the bad luck of running into a hospital which probably decided it was worth paying a salaried attorney to work full time to go after people for unpaid medical bills. This is not common at all.
Here's how most medical bankruptcies actually occur.
First off, even Mumbles' own article admits that about half of so-called "medical bankruptcies" aren't from medical bills themselves, but from people losing their jobs when they can't work due to medical issues. That's obviously a whole different matter, and something which wouldn't even be prevented with socialized medicine.
But let's focus on the other half -- actual medical bankruptcies.
First off, it's important to understand that the US medical billing is extremely complicated and overly confusing, to where even people who understand it (like me) can have a hard time making sense of certain multiple-coded medical bills. I've found a TON of errors (almost never in my favor) in my lifetime, including ones on bills for Benjamin, Ben's mom (who also understands it all well), and other family members. I can't imagine the average person making sense of this, if they don't have an understanding of how the system works.
There are three numbers you need to understand when you get a medical bill:
Billed amount: The amount the provider bills. Usually super-inflated.
Allowed amount: The contractually allowed amount by insurance. The rest falls off.
Patient responsibility: The portion of the allowed amount you have to pay, whereas the remainder is real money paid by insurance.
It's not unusual to see a bill like this:
Billed amount: $22,000
Allowed amount: $1,200
Patient responsibility: $150
So it goes from $22,000 to $150 thanks to having a preferred insurance provider.
However, what if you accidentally go to a place which doesn't take your insurance? Or an office tells you wrongly that they do, when they actually don't? Or the website of the insurance company has the wrong info? (The latter happened to me in 2019, and I just won an appeal based upon that.)
Well, then you owe the full $22,000 -- even if you had no idea this procedure would cost anywhere near that, and even if you got it done believing it would be in the low hundreds after insurance.
So that type of shit happens, and people don't understand how to fight it (and are often erroneously told they're stuck and can't), they just panic and declare bankruptcy if something like $22k would be a tremendous burden on them.
This is one of many scenarios. I know of someone personally who simply chose not to get insurance, her husband needed an expensive procedure done, they got it done, stiffed the doctor, the doctor went after them, and they declared bankruptcy. As bad as I felt for her, I also knew that this was a conscious gamble on her part to skip getting insurance, so you can't say she got screwed.
Much of this can be corrected by healthcare billing reform. I know that Trump actually signed some bill which is related to this, but I never looked up the details, so I'm not sure how much this will help.
Anyway, my point is that most of the "medical bankruptcies" aren't for the reason you think they are. Remember, insurance out-of-pocket maximums are usually no more than $8k. And the days of people getting rejected for insurance are over, as are the days of lower-middle-class people being unable to afford it.
At some point, people need to take personal responsibility for their bad decisions.
Also, we need medical billing reform and some other types of reform to our existing healthcare system.
But are people losing their houses because of ER visits where the bill ends up $200k? Aside from a few rare exceptions, they are not.
And yet you people still support this system. Mindblowing.
Spain has done ~ the same number tests/million people, and their case/million people is about double the US. It isn't neat, but it seems you could do a back of the napkin estimation our infection rate is about 1/2 of Spain's, with probably a lot more regional variability than Spain has.
this is off topic but you sound like a legit champion of obamacare, not just someone who is on the fence about it.
everything you're touting is solely because of the ACA. like, everyone having access to insurance and no caps on annual limits an insurance company will pay in a year.
before the ACA, those annual limit caps were not uncommon. now they're largely illegal.
Fair enough. That isn't a good way to estimate. Probably a better way would be to project deaths for the next 2-3 weeks (as death lags infections), assume a reasonable death rate based on comps (say 5%, or whatever) and estimate the infection rate from that.How do you figure that?
Yes, in regard to the percentage of the population tested you're about on par with Spain. You've tested a slightly higher percentage of your population but not a big difference.
7% of the tests performed in Spain are returning a positive result compared to 19.5% positive in the US. You also have 3x the amount of cases per million population.
How do you figure you have 1/2 the infection rate of Spain when the figures suggest you have 3x their infection rate?
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