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I have a friend--now deceased from cancer--who was denied by his insurance a promising cancer treatment, Proton Therapy, about ten years ago. The surgeon who would have performed it had herself been one of the early recipients of the treatment.
The deal there is that any new treatment ( especially if very expensive) takes some time to evolve, get accepted into the medical/surgical communities as effective, and then eventually gain insurance coverage. No doubt 10 years ago patients and docs would have difficulty getting proton therapy covered. There have been and still are other avenues of useful treatment for these patients.
Our govt/corporate model of health care sucks, but wanting to give more control to the very same people who who lied to us up and down about covid, shows how dumb Americans really are.
They’ll be telling us it’s good to get cancer and die young to help the planet heal. Of course they’’ll also be suiciding us like the Canucks do with the weak,old and poor.
Most of the problems that break people's economic backs are the ordinary stuff. Through being an Army brat, through an Air Force career, and now on Medicare (plus military retirement health benefits), I've been on government health care all my life...and it's fine.
When CA a few years ago floated the idea of Universal Health Care, the Legislative Budget analyst of the program found it would cost an additional 400 Billion in taxes and cause healthcare costs to rise another 50-100 Billion per year. And this was back in 2017/18. The proposal was dropped almost immediately after that report came out. For reference the 400 Billion is about 3 times what the entire Budget of the State of CA was for that year.
Because remember this is only for "basic" healthcare. People would still need to purchase additional health insurance to cover the things that the Universal plan doesn't cover.
Universal Health care may work in some Countries and situations, but it does not scale up very well.
States cannot afford the HC costs of their constituents because Medicare age patients are simply too costly and would quickly over burden their budgets. States cannot afford this because they cannot create money as can the federal gov't.
Any doctor who refuses to accept Medicare and used a student loan, attended a government-subsidized university or had a residency placement at a government-subsidized hospital should be required to immediately payback any outstanding loans and pay a penalty to cover the cost of the benefit they received.
That would take a huge change in retroactive loan rules. And I'd bet illegal by current contract law and even unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, it was still in the experimental stage and not FDA approved. That's your gov't involvement for you - and you want them to actually run healthcare in this country?
Medicare is more likely to cover before private insurance carriers all fall in line. The privates tend to follow Medicare's lead in these sorts of things.
I have a “good” private health insurance from my employer and I have ran into scenarios where I would get a labcorp bill for $500 outside of our deductible six months later because lab was deemed experimental and thus not covered by the insurance company. It was a routine lab that dr office orders for everyone as a part of their routine checkup; so it wasn’t something extra that we asked them to test. It took lot of back and forth phone calls and angry emails to get this straight. The process was stressful to say the least.
Our govt/corporate model of health care sucks, but wanting to give more control to the very same people who who lied to us up and down about covid, shows how dumb Americans really are.
They’ll be telling us it’s good to get cancer and die young to help the planet heal. Of course they’’ll also be suiciding us like the Canucks do with the weak,old and poor.
The bulk of most doc's work is in the healthcare of our elderly. Servicing their needs, improving on their health and QOL. As well as life span. And this has all been very much demonstrated by the Pandemic. Their HC is a very large part of our national HC costs. And as we will have more elderly moving forward, along with more expensive technical HC treatments, these costs will only grow. Because we docs understand and care about our elderly.
I have a “good” private health insurance from my employer and I have ran into scenarios where I would get a labcorp bill for $500 six months later because lab was deemed experimental and thus not covered by the insurance company. It was a routine lab that dr office orders for everyone as a part of their routine checkup; so it wasn’t something extra that we asked them to test. It took lot of back and forth phone calls and angry emails to get this straight. The process was stressful to say the least.
Healthcare system in this country is a joke.
Can you post what lab test?
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