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From a moral perspective, we still must care for them. A few years ago Yale New Haven Hospital I believe ran up a huge surplus in the fund for care for the uncompensated. We should never view that as acceptable-government sends them that money to use for those without resources. It is not a gift, and the AG rightfully shamed them into using the funds correctly-instead of steering the indigent away.
Really? I've read horror stories about people not getting chemotherapy treatments because they couldn't pay. Does the paperwork you have to submit to be eligible for charity take a while to get approved?
It depends on the charity. For instance, I could not get any kind of fertility saving measures because I could not afford the $15K up front cost and while I qualified for charity assistance, I would have needed to go through hormone treatment before chemo started and I needed to be in chemo ASAP. I didn't have the month to wait for charity. The money I received from the Leukemia and Lymphoma society came very quickly, though they had to cut a lot of their funding shortly before I was diagnosed due to the economy (I believe they're back on track now). The hospital billing office will work with patients directly for hospital-focused charity care and most hospitals also have social workers who help coordinate care.
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Originally Posted by kgordeeva
And how were you physically able to work while going through chemotherapy? Doesn't that just zap all the energy out of you and make you sick?
Working a desk job helped. I had chemo every other Friday and tried to be back in the office on Monday. My doctor wanted me to work part time because my energy was sapped and I got just about every weird side effect my chemo had to offer: lung damage, nerve issues, peripheral neuropathy (numb hands and feet), and a serious case of "chemo brain." It wasn't an option for me. For the week after each treatment, I would need to crawl up to my 3rd floor office and 3rd floor apartment on my hands and knees because there was no elevator and I didn't have the strength to do it. But I still got my work done.
I also have a good friend who was diagnosed in a similar timeframe as me (within 6 months of college graduation) with colon cancer, and when he lost the job he held upon diagnosis, he got a job stacking boxes at Whole Foods because they offered health insurance. They didn't know about his cancer status, and he was back stacking boxes a week after major abdominal surgery.
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Originally Posted by Cav Scout wife
I know people who have died from chemo, which is why if I am ever in that position, I will refuse it.
It's easy to say that from the other side: you haven't faced it. I would have died before my 25th birthday if I had not gone through with chemo. I had the same attitude until I actually got sick - and then realized that I didn't want to die and without chemo, I absolutely would.
Although I think everyone should receive treatment regardless of ability to pay, I do have a problem with cancer treatment in general. Too much money is wasted providing chemotherapy for advanced cancers that will not be cured and in all liklihood will only at best extend someone's life by a number of months. Chemotherapy is no picnic, it's usually not "quality of life" living, unless the chemo is tolerated very well. But the medical community continues to give patients false hope, that it's their "best shot" or giving hope when in reality, if most people understood that they are going to feel worse than ever due to the cancer's progression and the effects of chemo, they would make an informed choice to stop treatment and focus on palliative care, also saving a lot of money. Three out of five people will be diagnosed with cancer at some time in their life. If the cancer is advanced and surgery is not curative, think long and hard about quality of life verses longetivity. Chemotherapy is no picnic for the patient of their family.
In cases of financial hardship, some sort of triage is inevitable. Crude, essentially heartless decisions become an ineluctable consequence of a reality where money is finite but needs are open-ended. Presumably some distinction would be made between essentially terminal cancers (such as pancreatic, which has a 5-year survival rate of <5%) and in the opposite extreme, the milder skin cancers. And presumably a teenager with leukemia would get priority over an 80-year-old with a digestive system riddled by multiple cancers.
The great and abiding objection to "socialized medicine" is that somebody besides the doctor or the patient chooses what amount of care would be provided. This is regarded as being unfair, constraining the doctor and regarding the patient as an object, instead of a real and sentient human being. These are serious objections. But is there a credible alternative? Should we, as a society, spend $100K on 6-months of chemotherapy to extend a frail and elderly patient's life by a few months? An answer of "no" sounds crass and despicable, but behind an answer of "yes" lies an opportunity cost… perhaps other lives lost or shortened, other needs going unmet. Medicine is a finite resource. Somehow we'll have to balance competing needs, regardless of our political orientation or ethical compass.
I guess TS has a few millions to his name to ask this question silently presuming he'll never be sick and penniless. As insane as medical costs are, your above average income means squat, any serious illness would dry your savings warp speed. Insurance plans insure less and less, if at all, against financial ruin (they no longer should be called insurance, imho). A coworker' liver cancer bill exceeded 800k, he no longer can work, insurance soon to follow, awash in cash cancer specialists are very picky as far as accepting medicaid patients. 100% that coworker of mine wouldn't be alive for this long had he had medicaid instead of relatively decent insurance he got through his employer.
However, there is a deeper philosophical question here - what society is for? In the past a village commune or extended family would take care of their sick (as much as they could) and their burial, it was something every member of that group was entitled to. Developed world trashed all of that to get "prosperity" going. Some of us indeed can afford for profit equivalents of the entitlements we trashed, but most of us can't. Right-wing pundits repeat over and over that we as people are not entitled to anything in this world, only freedom? to capitalize on all those abundant opportunities to make enough $ to afford for profit services, and we should just crawl under and die if we failed to amass sufficient amount of $. Here is problem #1, people get together to become a group and/or society because it entitles them to certain things by virtue of them belonging to that group. If the number of entitlements shrinks to very abstract and impossible to define things like "opportunity", social collapse to follow, because "opportunity" is everywhere. If people are not entitled to for-profit medical care, elderly care, etc., etc., etc., they must be entitled to the things more "primitive" people were entitled to.
To paraphrase Epicurus:
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
If society is able to make medical treatments more affordable, more accessible, etc., but not willing. Then that society is malevolent if not evil.
Sort of a moot question now as everyone is required to have health insurance.
Sure, some people choose to 'beat the system' by paying a fine instead of securing health insurance.
In my mind that is a pretty stupid thing to do with your life; but that's just me.
That doesn't matter either. Now all you have to do is sign up after you're diagnosed and you get the "insurance" (AKA welfare subsidized by taxpayers).
That doesn't matter either. Now all you have to do is sign up after you're diagnosed and you get the "insurance" (AKA welfare subsidized by taxpayers).
You can only sign up for Obamacare at a certain time of the year. If you get sick and don't have health insurance, you will have to wait until the next enrollment period.
You can only sign up for Obamacare at a certain time of the year. If you get sick and don't have health insurance, you will have to wait until the next enrollment period.
My late stepson's mother died from brain cancer because she had no insurance. She worked full-time, but for a small employer who wasn't obligated to provide it. She was able to pay the bills for the imaging, diagnosis, and some medication, but nothing else, certainly not surgery, chemo, or radiation treatments. She wasn't low enough income to qualify for any of the programs listed above, but didn't make enough to afford insurance, and she didn't qualify for any kind of clinical trials. It was pretty sobering. (Of course, now her income would qualify her for a health insurance subsidy.)
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