Affordable Care Act Exchanges Fail To Detect Counterfeit Documentation (atr.org) 246
Tulsa_Time writes with this excerpt of an account from the (unapologetically partisan) Americans for Tax Reform about a report released by the Government Accountability Office in which "application and enrollment controls on the federal exchange and two state exchanges (California and Kentucky)" were investigated by supplying false information; in each case, the investigators were able to obtain and activate health insurance through the exchanges. A slice:
Ten fictitious applicants were created to test whether verification steps including validating an applicant's Social Security number, verifying citizenship, and verifying household income were completed properly. In order to test these controls, GAO's test applications provided fraudulent documentation: "For each of the 10 undercover applications where we obtained qualified health-plan coverage, the respective marketplace directed that our applicants submit supplementary documentation we provided counterfeit follow-up documentation, such as fictitious Social Security cards with impossible Social Security numbers, for all 10 undercover applications."
So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure submitting false information on those forms is illegal. So, make sure all the people responsible go to jail.
Re:So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure submitting false information on those forms is illegal.
Why should it be illegal? If you want to buy insurance for someone that doesn't exist, that is fine with me.
Re:So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should it be illegal? If you want to buy insurance for someone that doesn't exist, that is fine with me.
How about if in the course of applying, the fake person also describes a lifestyle that qualifies them for completely subsidized care that other people get to go to work every day to buy for them? This is no different than any other of benefit fraud.
an insurance is just paper... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about if in the course of applying, the fake person also describes a lifestyle that qualifies them for completely subsidized care that other people get to go to work every day to buy for them? This is no different than any other of benefit fraud
Well, it is different, an insurance is just paper (contract), when you obtain the contract to benefit a person that doesn't exist, you've acted in bad faith and obtained a contract that is invalid by nature.
:)
So your chances of successfully upholding the contract is slim. That said, yesm the fake people could probably get some care, before the private insurance company starts looking at the details... This is another problem with private insurance, if there is a problem with contract the insurance company will declare it invalid (but they won't do so before you file a claim, ie. only when do it when you the insurance).
But yes, this is great
Note. insurance contracts in the US are in my experience, super sketchy have through my employer and had to fight very hard to get any kind of actual paper... and I'm still not satisfied that I have sufficiently strong contract to sue my insurance provider should it come to that, and certainly not if my employer decided not to look out for my interest (which I don't have contract saying they will). So legally speaking I'm is a poor standing (despite working for tech company, and having an good PPO plan).
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How about if in the course of applying, the fake person also describes a lifestyle that qualifies them for completely subsidized care
Who cares? Now they have a FREE insurance policy that is worth $0 because it is in the name of someone that doesn't exist. Since no doctor is going to treat someone whose name and SSN doesn't match their insurance card, this would cost the taxpayers nothing.
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It';s potentially very useful for illegal immigrants, for drug addicts faking a medical record to get pain opiates, for fake billing by medical staff or insurance companies, for getting treatment for conditions your limited medical insurance is unwilling to provide for statistical reasons, and to obtain and and resell expensive medications on the black market.
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Re:So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure submitting false information on those forms is illegal.
Why should it be illegal? If you want to buy insurance for someone that doesn't exist, that is fine with me.
But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person? Buying insurance for a fictitious person should be as illegal as submitting claims for them, so if you find that someone has bought 1000 policies for fictitious people, you have a tool to stop them before they start submitting claims.
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But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
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But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
But can you see the point in not allowing it?
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Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Unless they don't do that say because you bribed them.
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But are you ok with them submitting and getting paid for claims for that fictitious person?
Claims have to be submitted through a medical office, which checks your ID. Besides, if you want to submit false claims, you can do that as easily for a real person as a fictitious person. The only difference is that the real person will have much less difficulty cashing the checks. Banks also check IDs.
Sorry, but I just don't see the point in getting an insurance policy for a non-existent person.
Offhand, if you're running this scheme for money then the doctor is in on it--one of the problems with traditional Medicare/Medicaid fraud is that the patient is an actual, real person who can be asked if you performed the procedures you billed for. As you might notice, this is a real thing and none of the problems you've mentioned should exist--the doctor is cashing the checks, the doctor is generating the false claims.
Now, you can also use this so somebody with fake ID--something that exists, and I'm not
Re:So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:4, Informative)
Why should it be illegal? If you want to buy insurance for someone that doesn't exist, that is fine with me.
Consider this scenario:
1) Create a pile of fake people.
2) Conspirator at insurance company gets them insurance.
3) Siphon money out of the company as commission bonuses.
If instead, you control the insurance company, then you can rake in the subsidies. Fake low income people, subsidized by Uncle Sugar, who never need medical care would be great for the bottom line.
Arrest the GAO? (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to arrest the GAO for fraud, for doing their actual job?
That's who wrote the report. Americans for Tax Reform just reported on it.
Re:So make sure they all get jailed for fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget about illegal. The system couldn't even figure out that the details were completely invalid and fictitious. It's unable to do the slightest bit of basic sanity checking.
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Wow. Die hard Obamabot. It's amazing you can breath, with your head shoved so far up his ass.
All entitlement programs are rife with trust/fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the typical charge for obtaining gov't assistance under many different false pretenses, but typically under-reporting income.
I, for one, would prefer to keep the trust but verify nature of the programs... the aim is not to catch fraudsters straight away, but to help folks when they need it. Sure, some will game the system, but likely not for an extended period before getting caught with the hand in the cookie jar.
Only Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, would prefer to keep the trust but verify nature of the programs
I would if there was any "verify". There was not.
People claim the U.S. should emulate Europe, but it seems they go mysteriously silent when it comes to emulating the controls that Europe has to make healthier care voting work to prevent fraud. If a system has endemic fraud it will eventually fail.
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It could have all been fixed with a 100 point check like system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bring in any mix of a birth certificate, passport like paperwork to show citizenship, refugee docs, licence or permit, local government docs, utility bill, rent agreement.
If a person has problems finding or updating the paperwork, help them get some of the above sorted out. The REAL ID Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] will be the n
Why this is a problem (Score:2)
If they are running the checks it means they are using them as a "manual override" against their internal data(which may be flawed). These checks exist to redistribute wealth via price discrimination according to a "means" test. If a person can claim to make less money than they actually do: the idea of selling a commodity below market price falls apart and attempts at rationing quickly become unsuccessful.
If the auditors scammed them successfully, that is "smoke" to the fire of a process breakdown. Gasp! I
Easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree.
Too bad it'll never happen here.
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Timing (Score:3)
Quality/accuracy auditing takes money. There's usually a brake-even point where the savings from catching problems is less than the cost of auditing as more auditors are added. We'd need more info to know where the break-even point is.
I suspect it may not be a real problem as long as they check credentials when an expensive procedure or treatment is done, such as surgery or an expensive medication.
Before such, as long as the "fakes" pay their insurance fees, they are not a (significant) cost drain to the system.
In short, fraud happening on the enrollment end may not be a practical problem.
Priorities (Score:2)
Yes, shame on the ones that dared to provide help for fellow human beings.
While we speak about lost money, how much did we pour into banks?
Of course, this generates huge profits (Score:2)
Hell they do this now to honest people - they are experts at setting up a one sided contract and simply not paying for the i meat of reasons when the payout time comes.
The stupid, it burns! (Score:3)
1. GAO report, so no fraud
2. Even if someone wanted to fraudulently create an applicant, I don't see the problem, as long as they don't submit a claim. What's wrong w/ additional premium? (I will ignore the geeky underwriters, as I understand their position, but haven't seen any relevant objections so far about messing up the statistics.)
3. You cannot begin to appreciate the stupidity of pretty much everyone in the insurance business - so the inability to do very basic SSN validity checking comes as no surprise at all.
I left the year ACA came into effect, so got to experience the fun as we tried to implement insurance plans that Congress had not defined. See, ACA went into effect 2014, but we (that is, insurance companies) didn't have black letter law or even Federally-defined policies established (on many different fronts) until way past Jan 2014. How can you determine policies if underwriters don't know what the rules are???
Biut what continues to be under-reported is what a complete disaster/fail the back-office procedures are. Are we finally able to determine if someone is eligible? When I left, there was no way to tell if an applicant was qualfied for subsidies under the various arcane income rules.
If I were dictator, I'd immediately force hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to fall under the anti trust [wikipedia.org] laws that everyone else has to follow. The high-deductible plans were created under the assumption that consumers would be motivited to shop around for the cheapest deal. But, it is impossible to get an actual quote for a procedure. If you require hospitals to produce a rate sheet that applies to all, and permitted people to import drugs from anywhere in the world, a massive amount of money could be saved.
But this cuts into rx profits, and we can't have that.
It works for legitimate documents (Score:2)
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Actually, I have suggested this exact plan. The US should tax Norway to buy stuff for US benefit recipients. Norway is rich. Why shouldn't we tax them?
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Because they aren't in the US.
We should tax Norway specifically because they aren't in the US. If we tax Norway, the US gets all the benefit and no one in the US pays anything for it. It's all benefit and no cost.
Re: There should be no validation! (Score:2)
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Oh god, no! Those poors were able to buy healthcare!
Or, they were able to get free services that other people get to pay for.
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Just like the services YOU get from the government that other people help pay for.
Which ones are those? I pay far more federal, state, and local taxes than most people, and then sales taxes on the things I buy. Have the country pays NO income taxes. I'm in the half that does. Do the math. Things like NASA, defense, etc., are paid for out of discretionary funds, entirely paid for by income taxes or by borrowed money on which taxes have to pay interest. How are the people who pay no income taxes helping me to pay for those things, again? Please be specific.
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"Those poors" are not debt ridden suburbanite conspicuous consumers. They know the value of money and don't squander it. They PAY CASH for services rendered and they don't even suffer for it.
Some of "those poors" are more solvent than you are.
Re:Affordable my ass (Score:4, Informative)
While true, you ignore the fact that they started skyrocketing long before Obamacare was passed.
OTOH, if you mean that the insurance companies should be cut out of the healthcare system, I agree completely. I'm in favor of free coverage for everyone without all the god-damn middlemen that have tripled the price. (And I mean that as in "God damned the sheep and they died.". Those insurance parasites should just drop dead...or at least be rapidly put on unemployment.)
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While true, you ignore the fact that they started skyrocketing long before Obamacare was passed.
Healthcare costs have been rising world-wide. Obamacare marked a decrease in the rise for the USA.
And I agree with you on the middlemen. They're adding approximately 30% to the cost of our healthcare by themselves. Minimum.
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No. Obamacare DOUBLED the rate of increase for plans. My state had respectable individual plans that could not be canceled. Except Obamacare caused them to be canceled. Now the decent replacement plans look like they're going to be canceled and nothing will be left but total crap.
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A lot of those 'respectable' individual plans weren't actually respectable if you got sick. I remember reading about a plan Walmart was offering. $5k deductible, $5k maximum payout, $100/month.
Re: Affordable my ass (Score:2)
Re: Affordable my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
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You're the idiot. You buried the point right in your post even. "Middleman" isn't "Middlemen". Yes, you're still going to have middle management, you're just going to have a lot less of it. IE the equivalent of one dude instead of a dozen.
I've read accounts of foreign medical providers. They just don't have the billing nonsense that we worry about all the time. They don't have to fight with a dozen insurance companies, just the one, generally speaking.
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I'm in favor of free coverage for everyone without all the god-damn middlemen that have tripled the price.
So free coverage - who pays the doctors, the nurses, the janitors, keeps the lights on and equipment serviced, etc.?
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My health insurance rates have nearly doubled since the implementation of Obama care.
I guess it's "affordable" when you're on the government dole and US taxpayer is footing the bill.
KEEP OBAMA IN PRESIDENT!!!
Mine quadrupled and I got less coverage.
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Of course. If you have contradictory first hand experience, then it's a lie. I personally know low paid working stiffs who were not helped by Obamacare.
Plans are still expensive.
Even worthless plans are expensive.
Deductibles are still high.
Plans without high deductibles are astronomical.
Costs continue to rise for everyone getting to the point where you need to be "wealthy" to afford a plan at all anymore.
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Unless you are wealthy the plans are subsidized so it is affordable. Saying it isn't is a Republican lie.
Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t, Bullsh*t!!!!!!!! A thousand times Bullsh*t. I lost my job, had ZERO INCOME. I still had to pay FULL PRICE for my coverage. Redid my application, NO CHANGE. NOT EVEN TAX CREDIT. I'm sure SOME people are getting subsidized, but it isn't people like me who have paid into the system for 30 years.
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I'm ok with that, but that doesn't mean it hasn't caused problems for other people.
Re: Affordable my ass (Score:2)
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Why would anyone here want to go into too much detail? If you make it easy to identify yourself then you're just putting a target on your back for every kook and troll on the planet.
The average slashbot should be smarter than that.
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Anything government is a total mess. Today I needed a replacement SS card. no problem, fill out the SS 5 form found online and take it to the office with my ID. Sounds simple. Actually it was not.
1 the take a number sign in was out of papter. 12 minutes to wait for the paper to be replaced.
2 Wait 2 hours to be called. Run out and feed the parking meter.
3 Sent away because my drivers license is invalid ID. Why was it invalid? It is due for renual next month. It is not expired. Went in to start the
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The real truth is that 12/15 new businesses fail in the first year. Over the next two years, 1 more business will go bankrupt, one will continue at a viable loss (definition: Owner makes less money per hour worked than owner could make working for someone else). and only ONE out 15 makes a real profit.
This compares with abou
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It isn't theft if you get something in return.
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Tell you what, never use our roads, our internet, our many other public services ever again. Shut yourself up in your private property hermitage, dig a well because you aren't allowed to use water that came from a river the government diverted for our benefit. We'll work out a list of products you can never use because they resulted from government backed research. Then.. yeah you can quit paying taxes then. We'll let you.
Why not set it up a la carte? See what public services people feel are worth paying their money for? It might actually get more rational public spending by pushing people to think about just where whatever public service they think would be cool and nifty to have will come from, especially since for things like 'community pool' you could have the trigger not be 'majority' but 'sufficient funding.'
It's very easy to vote for funding things such as a library, but my experience is that you're not going to be
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Imagine the description of what happened to you if one of those Republican-style private corporations controlled SSN cards or the DMV.
Why would we do that? Imagine you letting a Republican-style private corporation chop out your organs and sell them to the highest bidder? I can't imagine that either. There are some dumb things we just won't allow corporations to do. What I consider stupid is the idea that it's ok if the government does it (or often, lets Republican-style corporations do it as proxy).
They'd rob you blind then try to steal everything you have. Everything you have.
If that's a problem, then don't use those services. Don't be a blind idiot is always good advice.
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No need to imagine. Lots of states have privately run DMVs for car title-related stuff now. You walk in, talk to someone immediately, hand over your paperwork, they help you with real customer service and then at the end of the 10 minute process they tack on a $6-8 extra "fee" for not having to wait several hours at the still existing government-run ones.
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So if the gov't office were properly funded to the tune of $8 more we would get better service.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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Don't be such an innumerate MORON.
It's $8, not $800.
Even "poor" people can afford that kind of convenience should they so desire it. If that's not something they value, then they can squander that $8 on something that makes them feel wealthier than they really are.
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Bad framing (Score:2, Insightful)
The pro-ACA people don't care about screening out fake applicants. They think any person getting another government handout is a good thing, regardless of circumstance.
It's interesting that you describe health care as a "handout", and bolster the metaphor with "regardless of circumstances".
There are perhaps three dozen [wikipedia.org] examples of government-funded health care in the world that we can look to as examples. The US health care ranks worse [forbes.com] than all of the top 10 countries.
Framing it as "it's a government handout" implies the subtext "(that you do not deserve)", and is a bit of a misnomer. Our system is horribly broken, we pay 6x as much as other countries and for that price g
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You pay for all your health care up to 20% of your annual income (or buy insurance if you want) and the government pays the amount over 20% of your annual income.
The downside to this approach is that it encourages postponing small, cheap fixes until they become big, expensive problems.
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No. The problem is that people will readily pay for any number of luxuries but they have somehow gotten it into the heads that they should never have to pay for medical costs.
Even people that should know better revel in the idea of the "free lunch" they think they are getting when all they're really doing is making the whole process more expensive.
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The downside to this approach is that it encourages postponing small, cheap fixes until they become big, expensive problems.
Not really. Say you had a $400 health care bill. You'd postpone this until it became a $2000 health care bill? Or more? That would make sense at what level of income?
The flip side of the argument is that, when someone else is paying for it, people go to the doctor for cold medicine.
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yeah, people go to the doctor for a cough and find out that they have a serious disease and get it treated properly rather than assume it's a simple cold and spread it around to everyone they come in contact with.
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How can you people be so stupid and misinformed? Are you trolling on purpose. You have to be. There's no way you could possibly be this ignorant.
If you go to the doctor for every little cough, they aren't going to take you seriously. They aren't going to engage in "excessive diagnostic procedures" and find that "mystery disease". They're just going to think you're a wasteful hypocondriac.
People with REAL diseases have enough trouble getting doctors to take them seriously as is.
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That's an insane plan. Only rich people have 20% disposable income. I am almost in the 1% and I don't have anywhere near 20% disposable income. I would have to drop all insurance, sell my vehicles, turn off the water heater, cut off my internet, cut off my cell phone, and stop funding my retirement. Most people would end up behind on their rent or mortgage and get kicked out.
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...based on criteria carefully chosen to make sure the US comes out worst. (Does anyone still give any credence to these types of rankings? If you do, do you also click on clickbait headlines because you're curious what "doctors hate" and what "your insurance agent doesn't want you to know"?)
Yeah, criteria carefully chosen like "median life expectancy", "median wait times for healthcare", "cost per person", etc...
US healthcare tends to be a touch quicker than Europe's, but not significantly. We live shorter lives than the Europeans though. But we pay something like double to triple for that privilege.
If we could drop healthcare costs to something approximating Europe's, we could cover everybody for what the federal and state governments currently pay to cover a fraction of the population. I
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No. That idea of reducing health care costs is yet another one of those lies told through statistics. The "rack rate" for some expensive procedure is X where the real cost a hospital will actually get paid is 1/2 or 1/3rd of that.
You can "save tons of money" just by changing the numbers you look at it.
You people are droning on about public policy and you really have no clue at all.
I see stupid people and they don't even know they're stupid.
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No. That idea of reducing health care costs is yet another one of those lies told through statistics. The "rack rate" for some expensive procedure is X where the real cost a hospital will actually get paid is 1/2 or 1/3rd of that.
How odd, seeing as how the cost isn't calculated on what hospitals bill, but what is actually paid. IE insurance + copays(or direct payments) + government payouts.
Foreign governments are often even easier to determine.
You people are droning on about public policy and you really have no clue at all.
As the AC said, stop looking in the mirror.
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We live shorter lives than the Europeans though.
Which is not relevant to health care unless it is normalized to account for demographics, race, income, etc. Do Europeans who move to the US live longer or shorter lives than Europeans who stay in Europe?
But we pay something like double to triple for that privilege.
Who is this "we" you think are paying more? Lots of people pay zero. As a society, we borrow money so "we" don't pay the collective bill either.
Statistics (Score:2)
I'm not that far up on the statistics, though I know they're demographic adjusted. It doesn't help that the cost disparity holds up even or especially when you look at it on a procedure basis - Procedure A in the USA will cost 3-10x as much as procedure A elsewhere. An MRI, for example, is something like 1/30th of the price in Japan.
You're still paying even if you're borrowing to pay.
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Yeah, criteria carefully chosen like "median life expectancy",... We live shorter lives than the Europeans though. But we pay something like double to triple for that privilege.
You don't think the high crime rate, especially murder, has anything to do with that? Only cost of medical care?
Go on. Pull the other one.
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You don't think the high crime rate, especially murder, has anything to do with that? Only cost of medical care?
Our murder rate isn't that high. It only knocks a few days off, not years.
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I wouldn't copy Canada. I personally know someone that was killed by the Canadian system.
It's a fair point.
I'm not wedded to the Canadian system per-se, only pointing out that copying any of a dozen systems would put us much further ahead than we are now. By a wide margin.
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I wouldn't copy Canada. I personally know someone that was killed by the Canadian system.
Also, don't drink the Kool-Aid. There's a big difference between what gets billed and what gets paid. If you think American health care is overpriced, you're probably looking at a bogus inflated number.
The problem with people trying to turn the US into a European style socialist welfare state is that they don't have any actual experience with those. They just hear a lot of bogus media reports that distort the facts to suit a particular narrative.
As a Canadian I don't know anyone killed by our system. Either way tragic anecdotes happen with every healthcare system, that's the reality of mortality and limited resources, but people here seem much more satisfied with the state of our healthcare than Americans do, and we pay a bunch less at the same time.
I think there's a role for private insurance and companies in the US system for things like drug development. But as for actual hospitals, public insurance and institutions seems to work quite well with
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Government involvement is what causes this. You can track this fenominom back to when Medicare started paying the average costs for treatments instead of the actual costs. It got worse when the feds tried to save money by only paying a percentage of the costs.
What happens is a treatment costs X dollars, the government decided that because somewhere else it is cheaper they are willing to pay the average of the two but in order to save money, instead of fixing whatever is making it expensive, they are going
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What's surprising is that Kentucky is in the mix. Mitch McConnell pretty much ran on a ticket of how much better Kynect - th
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It's strange. If the Republicans are in the health insurance industry then why was it the Democrats passed a corporate welfare bill for insurance companies?
As far as the "drug price negotiation" bogey man goes, I would rather people like Clinton and Sanders didn't slay the golden goose. The parts of the industry that make new stuff create modern miracles and should be encouraged to keep on doing so.
Trying to "stiff doctors" and "stiff drug companies" is nothing to brag about. It's kind of sleazy really.
In t
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Here's your shot for intellectual honesty, as compared to just hating on Republicans.
In the current 2015-2016 election cycle, who is the top recipient of money [opensecrets.org] from "big Pharma", as you call them, almost 40% higher than the next closest candidate?
I bet Hillary Clinton just jumped to the top of your mind there, right? Health industry in general? Hillary, by 2.5x the next closest candidate.
Face it, if you look at the records, the industries donate to whoever they think might win. There isn't an ideological bi
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I've never met anyone who is pro-ACA.
I have met (and am one) people who think the ACA is marginally better than what we had before, and support it only because no decent medical plan has a chance of passing.
So yeah, while I'd prefer a single payer system, I know I"m not going to get it. I'd like this fixed.
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I'd like this fixed.
Why?
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Because there's no viable alternative.
We're not going to get single-payer. We're not going to get fully socialized health care. We might get Alan Grayson's "Republican health care", if the libertarians gain more foothold, but that's as bad or worse than what we had before.
We have to live with the system we have. I'd prefer it to work.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
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Total dollar fraud by individuals applying for a rate credit they don't qualify for will be dwarfed by the fraud dollar amount created by clever, unscrupulous medical providers.
Note: Rick Scott, FTR, is the governor of Florida, who was famous prior to that mostly for getting rich as the head of a hospital consortium... perhaps not the most unbiased source for objective review of the ACA program.
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You have it wrong, what they don't care about, or rather for, is the onerous and difficult process to get people covered.
Why do we need people to be covered? We don't have an insurance coverage problem. We have a healthcare problem. Insurance coverage != healthcare. In fact, because I have insurance like a good boy, I can't really afford medical attention. We have $1,000 in medical bills from this summer which we can't pay. If we had not paid our insurance premiums, we could have paid this down in two months.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
This class warfare thing is hilarious. The "elite" aren't suffering from this system designed to encourage fraud. I'm sure folks that are making a million dollars a year could care less about what amounts to a rounding error when it comes to the cost of their insurance. It's the MIDDLE class that's getting soaked here. The rich don't care.
Re: (Score:3)
The rich don't care.
Neither to the poor.
Re: So what? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: The Republicans... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear that a lot but can never find where any vote in congress happened where republicans actually voted for it.
The reality is a lot different than the picture you attempt to paint. Outside of some republicans in very liberal states, very few supported it and the support it seems to have recieved was the lesser of two evils type. There are plenty of conservative states which republicans controlled all branches of government which refused to adopt similar laws or the law you claim they championed. It has never been brought to the floor of the house or Senate any recieved any significant amount of republican votes. During the primary, Romney got slammed hard for Romney care by republicans and democrats both. In fact, even the democrats had severe issues with the PPACA and it only passed by legislative maneuvering and bribes to democratic senators when the democrats controlled both houses of congress and the administration.
You really should look into what you are repeating before blindly repeating it. Perhaps doing a little sanity check on your reality would be wise to. It certainly doesn't match the pictures you painted which is likely why you find yourself "informing" people so often. The reason they didn't know is because it is made up or presented fictitiousaly.
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"undocumented freeloaders" just pay cash.
They actually work, so they have it to spend.
You are confusing "undocumented freeloaders" for our urban poor that are too proud to take certain kinds of jobs.