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Urin Asshole

On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:12:20 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:13:26 -0400, "F.O.A.D." wrote:

On 3/12/13 10:15 PM, Urin Asshole wrote:
On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:25:24 -0400, wrote:

Are you trying to say the SSA trustees report is a lie?

I'm saying that when you say this **** "but I disagree that simply
putting everyone on Medicare would fix anything" you're making ****
up.

Do I need to tell you what page of the article we are talking about?

Start with the bold print "The way out of the sinkhole"

So, perhaps you need to read that section??

You mean this:

"I was driving through central Florida a year or two ago," says
Medicare's Blum. "And it seemed like every billboard I saw advertised
some hospital with these big shiny buildings or showed some new wing
of a hospital being constructed ... So when you tell me that the
hospitals say they are losing money on Medicare and shifting costs
from Medicare patients to other patients, my reaction is that Central
Florida is overflowing with Medicare patients and all those hospitals
are expanding and advertising for Medicare patients. So you can't tell
me they're losing money ... Hospitals don't lose money when they serve
Medicare patients."

Cost shifting is the name of *the* game in paying for medical care in
this country. Just about everyone in the game does it, too. Yesterday, I
was running errands and picked up an Rx for a neighbor who has the flu.
He is diabetic and takes insulin in those "handy" pen cartridges. The
full "price" of the Rx for a month's supply (one shot a day, three shots
per cartridge), was $800 and change. His co-pay amounted to about 20%,
and his insurance company paid the rest.

Now, you have to ask yourself, why is insulin so damned expensive? It's
not a new drug, it's been around for a long, long time. It's not the
packaging, the cartridges are no more complicated than a decent Pentel
plastic pen. The needles are sold separately. The answer is that
everyone along the way is making a huge profit off this relatively
simple but life extending drug, and that includes the neighbor's
insurance company.

You forgot the development/approval cost and the lawyer tax. It
probably cost $50 million just to get through FDA testing on the pen
and the first person to get a bad outcome will be suing for another
$50 million.

Bull****. You prefer to blame everyone except the right wingers and
the money that's in the poliitical system from the med lobby.

I can see the ad on TV "Did you use the insulin pen and suffer
anything bad at all? Call Dewey, Chetum and Howe. We have money for
you"

Your solution is to prevent people from being justly compensated. Why
don't you bring up the McDonnalds hot coffee case if you'd like to
look really stupid.

We do almost nothing in this country to actually control medical costs.
If Medicare "under-reimburses," those "lost profits" are assessed
against someone else, either an insurance company or an individual. The
insurance company covers its "losses" by overcharging its clients. In my
wife's field of psychotherapy, psychiatrists charge about $200 per
patient visit, and what do most of them do during that visit, which,
typically, lasts about 15 minutes? They try to find out if the meds they
are prescribing are "helping." They don't provide any therapy; that is
left to various non-medically-degreed mental health professionals. Ever
paid $20 for a Tylenol in a hospital? Or $15 for a package of facial
tissues? It's cost-shifting.

Some of that is simply the red tape required to meet all of the
compliance requirements. ALL drugs in a hospital have inventory
controls you would expect for tracking plutonium. Some of it is simply
to control theft but, again, a lot of it is to mitigate liability
The nurse can't simply go shake a tylenol out of the bottle and give
it to you. They need an order from a doctor, they log it out of the
pharmacy and track it from there to the patient's mouth.
Unfortunately they have similar BS for everything you get and
virtually nothing can be logged back into the system.
The last time I was in the hospital for an outpatient procedure they
issued me a pee bottle. I gave it back to them, still sealed in the
plastic. They said "keep it, we can't give that to another patient
now" It was about $20.

Yeah, a small part of it.

You accepted that $20 pee bottle without complaint right.. because
your insurance was paying not you. That's part of the problem too.
Read the Brill article again.

We need to entirely restructure how we pay for medical care in this
country. I don't see it happening, so we all will continue to be ripped
off by the supply chain...hospitals, drug companies, insurance
companies, and to a lesser degree, direct providers of services.

Sad but true. Maybe if the Charge master was posted on the hospital
web site so everyone could see it, they might have to explain why it
is what it is.

No. Chargemaster needs to be outlawed. Or, they have to justify in
writing each cost item, not just list their made for TV price.