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Sorry to hear about all your wife's medical issues. It sounds similar to what my husband and I went through at the beginning of our marriage, over 40 years ago. However, we did have medical insurance, the traditional 80/20 kind, which was what was available back then.
You said your wife a has applied for disability. Is this a disability plan through her employer or former employer? Or do you mean SSDI, or perhaps SSI? So the Dr's have said your wife will be unable to work for a period of time? Have they indicated how long? Are you talking about post-surgical healing, or perhaps while she is under going chemo or radiation? Or something permanent? Have you checked the insurance handbooks to see if her diagnosis(s) are covered by the disability insurance?
I am going to assume you have already applied for Medicaid, and for some reason were denied.
Are you receiving Nutrition Assistance [formerly known as Food Stamps]?
I am not exactly understanding your work situation. Do you have any kind of employment at all? What about your wife? Was she working up until her illness? I know you said you were college students; how far along are you toward graduating? Are you majoring in something where you could switch into a co-operative program, where you can work in a related field part-time, gaining both $$$ and work experience? How are you financing your college education and the housing expenses?
The previous posters have given some great advice, all worth exploring. There are also programs through pharmaceutical companies where you can pay much less for drugs and some supplies. These programs do require extensive paperwork, but can save you a lot of money if you do qualify. Here is one example: Lilly Cares - Assistance Programs| Provided by The Lilly Cares Foundation, Inc. .
There is always the possibility of cutting back and attending school part-time and working FT, preferably in a job that offers decent health insurance. Or hit all the Starbucks and Costco in the area -- they provide health insurance to part-time workers.
What about taking some of your courses at a Community College? Make sure the credits will transfer before you do this. Or what about moving in with relatives and transferring schools? These may be ways to cut expenses.
The cost of modern healthcare is going up rapidly.
I do not see any way to bring healthcare costs down.
It might help to get government out of the way, and minimize the number of open palms between the PATIENT and the HEALTH CARE GIVER.
(Insurance also imposes a huge cost, because "someone" has to pay for the clerks, paperwork, administrative overhead, board decisions, etc, etc. as well as the dividends to stockholders.)
There is no RIGHT to healthcare / medicine when government makes it a crime for UNLICENSED trade in healthcare and medicine. It is an expensive privilege.
Before glorious socialism, there were "evil" sects who provided no-cost / low-cost healthcare. They had "free" charity wards, and "paid for" hospital rooms. The workers often were religious renunciants who were unpaid for their life long devotion to service.
Along came government, forcing them to change and pay salaries (taxable) while driving up the cost from bureaucratic overhead. Few remain in operation today.
Today, medicine and healthcare is now wholly secular and "professional."
It might help to get government out of the way, and minimize the number of open palms between the PATIENT and the HEALTH CARE GIVER.
(Insurance also imposes a huge cost, because "someone" has to pay for the clerks, paperwork, administrative overhead, board decisions, etc, etc. as well as the dividends to stockholders.)
There is no RIGHT to healthcare / medicine when government makes it a crime for UNLICENSED trade in healthcare and medicine. It is an expensive privilege.
Before glorious socialism, there were "evil" sects who provided no-cost / low-cost healthcare. They had "free" charity wards, and "paid for" hospital rooms. The workers often were religious renunciants who were unpaid for their life long devotion to service.
Along came government, forcing them to change and pay salaries (taxable) while driving up the cost from bureaucratic overhead. Few remain in operation today.
Today, medicine and healthcare is now wholly secular and "professional."
Things are so much better, now. [/sarcasm]
You could just pray the illness away, unless you question your faith.
Things back in the middle ages were so much better.
I would recommending using CareCredit if only to consolidate the bill and hedge against a risk of default. Then I would use GoFundMe and whatever scraps of money occur, to feed the CareCredit.
Facebook and other social media sites have lots of groups filled with GoFundMe funders who literally have nothing to do but pay your bills. They
Care Credit??? The worse! Unless you pay the total balance in one year, you get clobbered with higher interest rates than regular credit cards.
Why would anyone recommend Care Credit for someone in debt?
It angers me that the cost of medical care and drugs is prohibitively high. A lot of professions and businesses have high start up costs and educational requirements - but they aren't earning hundreds of dollars per minute. I know of so many people - in double digits - who were practically ruined by medical debt. Good, hard working people who lived their lives frugally, paid their debts and were charitable when they could be - who suffered medical issues. Aside from the emotional and physical traumas they endured - and the grieving they still endure for loved ones who didn't make it - they now suffer financially for having gotten sick or had a family member become ill. Savings - gone. Future plan - destroyed. They live now with medical collectors and medical bills that never seem to end - never seem to get paid off. And some of them are still fighting to get well or just feel better knowing all they will have left to leave their family - is a legacy of medical debt. Almost a million dollars in medical bills for some surgery's - cancer treatments and complications - dialysis. It really shouldn't be this way. And I feel so bad for all those people put in that position. And these are people WITH insurance - who were paying hundreds of dollars a month in premiums - who were still left tens of thousands of dollars indebted.
It angers me that the cost of medical care and drugs is prohibitively high. A lot of professions and businesses have high start up costs and educational requirements - but they aren't earning hundreds of dollars per minute.
While I appreciate a good tirade against high healthcare costs as much as the next guy, I can't let this piece go untouched. There are a couple things wrong here. First, your math. "Hundreds of dollars per minute" is like 12k an hour, which is like 1.9mill a month. So check your hyperbole.
Secondly, you're equating the COST of medical care with what providers are paid. Not the same. It's not that simple. Physician salaries are only a small part of the equation. There's the cost that goes to running offices, clinics, and hospitals. The cost of equipment and software. Malpractice and liability insurance. Every entity along the way needs to make a profit to keep running, because ... America.
And the biggest unnecessary expense of them all -- insurance carriers. The blood sucking leeches that have inserted themselves between you and your health care, siphoning off the money you pay, denying you treatment, and requiring extra staff for providers to file claims for you and manage trying to get paid for care they provided you. Massive profit-seeking companies who add NOTHING to the care you receive. If you want to blame someone for your medical debt, blame the insurance company that takes your premium and portions out your care as they see fit. Or blame them for reimbursing providers so little that the providers are forced to make up the gap by charging ridiculous prices to those who aren't bound by an insurance carrier contract.
While I appreciate a good tirade against high healthcare costs as much as the next guy, I can't let this piece go untouched. There are a couple things wrong here. First, your math. "Hundreds of dollars per minute" is like 12k an hour, which is like 1.9mill a month. So check your hyperbole.
Secondly, you're equating the COST of medical care with what providers are paid. Not the same. It's not that simple. Physician salaries are only a small part of the equation. There's the cost that goes to running offices, clinics, and hospitals. The cost of equipment and software. Malpractice and liability insurance. Every entity along the way needs to make a profit to keep running, because ... America.
And the biggest unnecessary expense of them all -- insurance carriers. The blood sucking leeches that have inserted themselves between you and your health care, siphoning off the money you pay, denying you treatment, and requiring extra staff for providers to file claims for you and manage trying to get paid for care they provided you. Massive profit-seeking companies who add NOTHING to the care you receive. If you want to blame someone for your medical debt, blame the insurance company that takes your premium and portions out your care as they see fit. Or blame them for reimbursing providers so little that the providers are forced to make up the gap by charging ridiculous prices to those who aren't bound by an insurance carrier contract.
Yes, I did not include insurance carriers in my rant nor do the math. Just basing it on the fact that when my daughter worked as a receptionist/bookeeper/office manager through college, she'd tell us how all the docs in the outfit - specialists and GPs - would double book and sometimes triple book appointments. So each "exam" would basically get about 3 or 4 minutes with the doctor - and the doctors were charging upwards of $300 for each "exam". Sure they pay nurses, and staff - but they are also billed accordingly and after a couple years in practice - the outfit wound up, not only paying off their capital outlays of equipment & software in a couple years but wound up buying the entire building and then getting rents from all the other businesses in the building on top of everything else. Plus I know people, personally, who had 2 or 3 days in a hospital - and the bills were literally a million dollars with insurance paying most of it but still leaving them with $25 - 30 grand in bills on top of all the copays for the outside care they needed and prescriptions etc. So $2 million a month - not too far off. I do keep company with some docs who became multi-millionaires in record time. I know there are others who wind up working for state run non profits and graduate with huge student loan debts too - and it takes them longer - but I've never known a physician practising over 5 years living hand to mouth.
chattyneighbor, so your daughter worked for a bunch of unethical doctors who triple booked and triple billed. Why didn't you or she actually report them? Sorry, but if you didn't, you're part of the reason why medical costs are so high. Your daughter let them get away with illegal and unethical behavior. That's not the system allowing them to make excessive income; that's crooks breaking the rules and getting away with it.
This statement: "but I've never known a physician practising over 5 years living hand to mouth."
That is almost too ridiculous to respond to. Um, they shouldn't be living hand to mouth. No one should, especially not someone with 8 years of post-high school education and 3+ years of residency. In your logic, why is living hand to mouth the standard by which we judge excessive pay? There's a whole spectrum between "living hand to mouth" and "gazillionaire."
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