My Son broke his arm (type 3 fracture) last week. We went to our local ER and were seen immediately. We ended up spending 3 nights in hospital and having multiple surgeries to pin and correct the break. He’s on a 6 week care plan with scheduled appointments with a specialist team.
Want to guess how much it cost us? $0 (or 1.5% bracketed tax of my income per year) b-b-but that’s socialism!!
No we don’t have fancy private health insurance, we just live in a country that doesn’t punish it’s citizens for being poor.
The USA needs a revolution.
Similarly, if you’re accused of a crime and you’re poor, you might not be able to afford bail money, so you’ll be stuck in jail and you’ll inevitably lose your job, ruining your life, regardless of whether you’re guilty or innocent.
Meanwhile if you’re rich and an Epstein co-conspirator pedophile who raped and sex trafficked children, the government won’t even arrest you.
the hospital went to court to garnish 35% of her wages. She works at McDonalds.
Not that I question the unsourced anecdotes of the God account, but I’d be genuinely curious to see a business that thought an astronomical legal bill would be worth garnishing the wages of a service sector worker.
As someone with family in the legal profession and the medical billing profession, it’s crazy to think of the cost-benefit of pursuing this kind of claim given the return expected. Hospitals write off millions a year in “bad debt”, because collection is consistently more expensive than the real value of these claims.
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Making up stories to prove a position only weakens the position, IMO. We have plenty of real life stories why the healthcare indsutry (shouldn’t even have to call it an industry) is disgusting without needing to fabricate things.
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My brother in law had a medical bill that was supposed to be covered by insurance, but they didn’t pay. (A small-ish bill of a few thousand dollars) His bill was sent to collections, and they hounded him for years, despite him having in writing that the insurance and hospital both agreed that the insurance was supposed to cover it. After 8 years, they started garnishing his wages. This is when he decided to get a lawyer involved, and he was able to successfully sue the hospital for garnishing wages illegally. The hospital had to pay out 30K.
All that to say, hospitals aren’t always acting intelligently or legally.
How did they garnish his wages without having a court involved? They would had to have sued him already in court.
Can hospitals still sell their debts to third party collection agencies? Those groups seem like exactly the type to garnish McD wages.
John Oliver bought a bunch to forgive if I remember correctly.
My first child has a genetic disorder. We had to spend 4 months in hospital during the first year and just one medication the kid has to take costs ~€250k per year.
For the hospital stay we paid a total of €0.
The medication costs ~€7 per pack and is capped to 2% of my yearly income.
Apparently not letting kids die from treatable conditions is socialism though.
Whether you are a hardcore capitalist, or any other political ideology, I just don’t understand how anybody can be against social policies.
In my country, people complain that our benefits system is crippling us. SOME people take advantage of our disabilities and childcare benefits, but it’s a small price to pay for having them – at the end of the day, if I had a disability which meant I could not work, my country would take care of me. For that, I am more than happy to pay more tax.
This extends to healthcare, childcare, education, etc. it’s easy to sit and grumble when you see the tax bill every month, but god forbid you ever actually need these services. I am VERY happy I do not require disability benefits, and I am VERY happy that I pay into a system that makes this (and other services) available for those who do.
