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In general, I agree with this. Originally, insurance was simply hospital insurance. You paid for outpatient expenditures but your insurance company paid for your inpatient expenditures. Believe me, today it is not difficult to generate a $50,000 hospital bill. Most people couldn't pay that easily.
One of the big problems today is that the existence of insurance contributes to doctor's salaries. They charge more because they can get more. If we were to scrap the idea and just pay out of pocket for everything, we would need to have a discussion about doctors' fees. Does a particular doctor really need to be making $400,000 annually, or under a different market without insurance companies, would something closer to $200,000 be more appropriate? Regardless of whether or not doctors are overpaid, the current system makes your proposal cost-prohibitive for many at the moment. The AMA is a huge lobby, and doctors have no interest in getting rid of the middle man because it means they can charge more.
I'm not sure I agree with this entirely. It seems to me that they charge more to make up for the huge discounts insurance companies are imposing on them. Both win! That way, the insurance company can send me a statement that says they "saved" me 67% of the total bill.
I suppose they are just getting while the getting is still good. I hope we replace the entire private insurance system with government sponsered single payer health care as soon as possible. We do not need private insurance over head costing us money that could be better spent on care.
I couldn’t agree more with you! Remember when doctors and hospitals served the public in the days before “for profit health care” ? The health care system is broken and we need to return to the days when “greed” wasn’t a factor. Health care for profit simply allows for gross profits at the suffering of people, it simply isn’t morally right.
Remove the greed and have government single payer health care is the only solution.
So, doctors and hospitals charge more to make up the loss they get from accepting Medicaid, Medicare and Tri-Care patients. Insurance rises to stay on top of the doctors rise in cost, forced on them by our government policies.
Put the blame squarely where it belongs, please!
Ding ding ding.. we have a winner..
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jillaceae
Not quite.
Insurance companies try their hardest to get out of paying any bill. Often, they underpay. From a purely business standpoint, this makes sense for them. This has nothing to do with government policies. A large hospital writes off tens of thousands of dollars a day in bills that really should have been paid. Providers have no legal recourse against this because if you sue an insurance company, you might get paid, but then the insurance company simply says their customers can't go to you anymore, and boom, you've both lost and angered a bunch of your customers. It is true a majority of providers' revenues comes from the private insurance industry, BUT that doesn't mean they don't contribute in a large way to rising health care costs.
Additionally, insurance companies LIKE government involvement in the business because it gives them an excuse not to pay for things. Increasingly insurance companies use the fact the Medicare doesn't pay for certain procedures and charges as an excuse that they shouldn't pay for certain procedures or charges, despite the fact that Medicare wasn't designed to be all-encompassing.
Insurance companies pay the set rates setup by government.. It is government that sets percentiles, UCR rates, ICD 9/10 rates, not the private sector. And if you think insurance companies are underpaying, then surely you will agree that government is, since they all pay under the same guidelines.. again, established by government!!
Your agent is lying to you. I work with Doctors on a daily basis and they say the opposite. So who should I trust...your insurance agent or a Doctor?
Then explain to me why the CBO said costs will go up MORE with Obamacare than without it? Lets see who we should trust, your doctor, or the governmental agency responsible for analyzing costs involved with bills and their affects on consumers?
Your Doctors wouldn't know square 1 about who pays what, they dont do billings, they contract this out to processors or billing departments.. They are insulated from the billing activities and payment activities for a reason, which is government doesn't want them making health decisions based upon financial considerations of the patients. I'd say somewhere along the line you are confused.
and most are approved....and have been for some time...you think Insurance companies have no influence on the state or the "approval"...how naive....
Seriously, that's so grossly incorrect that I'm laughing out loud right now.
Ever made a rate filing in your life? In a state like Washington?
Heck, you didn't even know about the process until probably today.
P.S. Very few filings are ever disproved. They are approved for less than initially sought or withdrawn. Anything else you want to know based in fact and reality please don't hesitate to ask.
Premium rates for many in the individual market are going up. But state insurance commissioners and health care experts told us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is responsible in most cases for only a small portion of these increases. The main cause of double-digit rate hikes is rising medical costs.
So does anyone dispute the role of rising medical cost as playing a bigger role with the increase in certain premiums over the health care law's role?
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