Originally posted by Bill in Dayton:
I'm glad for you and your family that your situation worked out as it did. But as the Devil's Advocate in this thread, who do you suppose DID pay for your treatment?
Well, that is still pending. Right now they are billing ME. Blood from a stone, and all that. Not too good for my credit rating at the moment, but I gotta say it beats the hell out of a casket. I'll survive and the Lord will find a way.
Maybe they will have to list me as a "write off". The system is prepared for those instances, actually. Happens all the time. This is one of the beautiful things about the private insurance system, the fact that all monies are invested into a pool that is then used to pay for expenses, NOT the direct amount of money paid by the insured.
Your costs had to go somewhere, Mac. Directly perhaps the Hospital, Doctors, etc. all just wrote your charges off. Indirectly, the costs associated with your care were absorbed in higher premiums and/or fees for others who do pay for hc.
Look, I'm no deadbeat, for over 4 decades I maintained health insurance payments. It is one of those ironies of life that I never really needed to take advantage of the insurance coverage to such a demanding level until last November, when, in a situation where the falling economy left me laid off and between jobs, the disaster of disease struck. However, for those years that I paid into the system, I'm sure they made enough money off of me to pay for the defaulted bills of many others. Besides that, the insurance companies were INVESTING the monies I'd sent them and at the standard return rate of 12% per annum, plus the "rule of 9" that applies to such investments, they still made a profit. And then some.
We don't just pay a little more...we pay a LOT more than any Industrialized Country in the world, and yet we don't have the outcomes you'd think that money would buy.
We GET a lot more, too. So do those industrialized countries, in the form of new treatments devised here in the US, new medicines discovered and marketed here, research and development, etc.
Our healthcare is rationed because not everyone's story ends as well as yours did. Too many people can't gain access to HC so preventable illnesses turn into sometimes fatal ones for no other reason than no insurance.
I invite you to visit any general nonprivate hospital and read the sign posted at the ER door, by federal law. It disagrees with that.
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