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ILL Machina posted:The insurance industry is the problem. I don't see any other way around it. I wouldn't have a job of the system wasn't so hosed and everyone could do accounting without machine learning leaps, but I would prefer it. Burn it all down, salt the earth, and guillotine the people responsible for it. If I don't have health care, I'm dead (thanks, unlucky roll of the dice), so because I have comparatively good healthcare where I currently am, it's making it really hard to find a new job. Meanwhile, even though I have insurance that covers me pretty well, I'm still completely terrified of something getting billed wrong, or some out-of-network person walking by when I'm at a hospital and then ending up with a $20k bill that I can't pay.
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Aug 7, 2020 02:29
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Craptacular! posted:This changed when the state capped ER bills on people with unaccepted plans and smoothing out the other difficulties in the way where the out-of-network hospital would basically have to eat the cost. And then, suddenly, the nearby hospital worked out a deal with the provider I chose and now I can go there now. Apparently if you reduce the opportunities for hospitals to bankrupt people and force them to take losses in those situations instead, they get far more negotiable with every insurance network that they can. Who knew?! This, right here, is one major source of bullshit (of many) in this system: insurance networks that are so narrow so you have a choice of like three doctors to go to (with the only one that's accepting new patients being a two hour drive, one way, and God help you if you have to take the bus), and providers that deliberately don't contract with insurers so that they can gently caress people with huge bills and then strongarm them down to merely excruciatingly extortionate payments rather than blatantly crippling ones.
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Aug 7, 2020 04:38
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah, or treatments that are technically covered on paper but in practice they offer such a pittance in compensation no one offers it in network. You of course wouldn't know this if you say pay extra for the next tier of coverage during open enrollment because you really want or need that treatment. Mental health care is especially notorious for that. I've known people who specifically jumped through all the hoops to get cognitive behavioral therapy approved by their insurance only to have the rug pulled out from them and no therapists that offer that are in their network within 100 miles. Oh, mental health is its own special brand of hosed. If I go to my health insurance's site and put in my plan number, it gives me a huge list of providers to choose from, but if I actually try to use it at one of them, I find out later that my employer had mental health carved out and given to a different company that has almost nobody in network in my area (and completely stonewalled my last therapist when he tried to get into their network; they basically never returned his calls). Their web site straight up lies to me, plus the tiny mental health network means that I've been paying my therapist a heavily-discounted cash rate for years.
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Aug 7, 2020 05:40
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Griefor posted:This is just plain false. Huge pharma coorporations have been buying up smaller companies that just developed an effective new treatment, jacking up the prices and slashing the R&D department because there is no short term profit in R&D. Even though that R&D department researched the treatment they are now making bank on. Dozens of smaller companies that still did research have been gobbled up by big pharma for the patents and had their R&D shut down. It also incentivizes finding ongoing treatments rather than cures. Why let somebody pay $200,000 for a cure when they could be paying you $10,000/month for years? How much that actually happens is something that will probably never be publicly known, but I have no doubt it's more than never.
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Aug 7, 2020 15:42
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BiggerBoat posted:What are the healthcare PLANS of the two parties/candidates exactly again? See the thread title. You should be paying into the system until you're bled dry, and then you can go die in a gutter when there's nothing left to squeeze out of you. This is the position of both the Dems and the GOP. The only difference between them is whether the ACA should be the vehicle to do it.
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Aug 8, 2020 01:07
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KingNastidon posted:Conspiracy theory bullshit. Trust me, enough doctors and VCs and biotech founders/CEOs are megalomaniacs in that they'd rather be on Time Magazine for curing X than increase their already high net worth. People aren't letting The Miracle Cancer/Alzheimer's Cure die on the vine in the clinic because treating the disease is more profitable than curing it, maaaann. You can't simultaneously believe that corporations only care about maximizing next quarter's revenue and that they're walking away from 100% market share at essentially any price for a cure. Also while clinical trials are sponsored and paid for by pharma, major academic hospitals/doctors are the primary investigators. The conspiracy doesn't run so deep that everyone is hiding The Cure. Giant pharma companies don't have to hide cures. They just have to be aware of things like Sovaldi and decide where their money is best spent to generate maximal returns and, therefore, the most investor attention. I have little doubt that if a cure for something is developed, that it'd be made available, but it's also a fact of capitalism that rent-seeking behavior is not only encouraged but demanded, and while investors love to hear about record profits, that can turn around real quick if suddenly the product that was responsible for those isn't any longer.
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Aug 8, 2020 02:13
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