Was taken by ambulance. Arrived Monday late afternoon and went home mid morning Wednesday. All I had to do while there was sign a piece of paper agreeing to let the government pick up the tab. That was a load off my mind.
Until you have to pay your taxes. When it's not you that is actually directly paying for your own treatment, there is very little incentive to make sure the hospital is not overbilling. Someone pays for it though.
it's like group insurance, everyone pays reducing costs to the individual. This common business practice why should it be any different when applied to healthcare... you're assuming that it wasn't a publicly funded hospital...here the UHC pays only a single predetermined rate for public and private care, if someone wants to use a private care facility they pay out of their own pocket for any over billing...
But that is a private business, and not all of them do it. If in some cases it is not as economical to have a group plan, then the business will be forced to pay its employees less to compensate. The workers who would prefer not to be in such a group plan (theoretically) will be more likely to work for a business that does not offer this type of plan, but where the pay is higher. And you are forgetting all the self-employed people and business owners who may not want to be forced into a group plan. Some small businesses have actually had to stop offering group plans because one chronically sick employee was causing the rates to go through the roof. In the USA at least, the MediCare system makes it illegal to overbill more than a small percentage of the predetermined rate. This price fixing has already led to shortages in some areas. If a patient cannot find a doctor willing to treat them, or wants to go outside the system to be able to pay for a doctor who charges more, MediCare refuses to pay for it. Effectively this is like a huge tax because the individual has been paying taxes into Medicare all his life and then the system refuses to reimburse him the money back for medical treatment when he needs it. This is not to say that unscrupulous doctors and hospitals cannot drastically overbill MediCare. It happens all the time, very frequently. They may not be able to bill much for each individual procedure, but they can (and do) provide additional medical treatment that is not medically justified from the standpoint of cost. Or even bill MediCare for treatment never received, also more common than you would think. In other words, when I talk of "overbilling", it is the worst of both worlds. The doctor cannot "overbill" for how much he needs to bill the patient for, while at the same time other doctors have a perverse incentive to provide unnecessary treatment. When taken together, you have to wonder whether some doctors will be forced to scam the system just to stay in business. There would be similar shortages of doctors in the UK willing to work for the modest price the government sets, if it where not for all the cheap doctors and nurses they bring in from India. Whether this is a good thing ( I do not think it is) is another long discussion for another thread.
a UHC plan like I have has millions of members and costs less than private insurance schemes with tiny enrollment...in our UHC opting out is not an option, everyone participates ... we don't have those issues, MDs get a predetermined rate for each procedure, private pay clinics are not competitive with UHC, people are not going to pay extra to private clinic for the same procedure they receive in UHC... MDs here can open their own private clinics and hospitals if they wish but very, very few do because other than a few wealthy clients they can't compete with Universal Health Care for clients...UHC Mds are paid well and have no need to go into private care...
Sorry to hear you had to be admitted to a hospital and glad to hear that you either were covered by Medicare or Private Insurance. Let me remind you that if covered by Medicare or most private insurance policies you will be responsible for you deductible and/or co-payment and may receive separate bills from doctors and other non-hospital employees. wrong you can bill anything you want but medicare will only approve what they predetermine and the patient will only be responsible for their co-payment of that amount. Again wrong. Medicare will not approve payment on any treatment billed that they find to be not medically necessary. Let me add this, a doctor or surgeon gets paid nothing additional if they had to use costly supplies during an office visit. Medicare only pays reimburses for a routine office visit even if the physician applies an unna boot(similar to a cast) or has to take more time actually applying a treatment. So they are paid nothing more than for a routine office visit (many cases only $30-40.00) regardless of the time or supplies. What say you to that? When a lawyer bills by the minute and plumbers and electicians charge a standard fee and on top of that charge for their supplies?
