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14% interest on hospital bills?
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So you are saying if someone can't afford medical treatment they shouldnt get it?
Personally I have about $2800 in unpaid medical expenses.
It should have been $5000+ but the Dr that did the outpatient surgery decided not to charge me being a poor college student without insurance.
The $2800 came from two ER visits. If the Dr from the first ER visit properly diagnosed me and treated me correctly, there wouldnt have been a second ER visit.
fbrdphreak
Lifer
Word
FelixDeCat
Lifer
Damn smokers. Its their fault!
If you don't mind playing a game you can substantially reduce your bill. Don't pay at all. They will hound you and eventually threaten you with sending the bill to a collection agency. To prevent this eventuallity they will finally offer you a considerably lower bill if you pay now and they will not damage your credit. They gouge the people who don't have insurance to make up for the fact that insurance only pays about %10-20 of what they actually want to charge for procedures. They will finally offer you the same rate the insurance company pays to make sure they get paid. They don't want the bill going to a collection agency any more than you do. It is a gamble but it does work.
The local hospital tried to charge me $1000 for six stiches in my hand about 12 years ago. It was a joke. I looked at the bill. They had three nurses take my pulse at different times while I waited in a room....they wanted to charge me $100 for each time the nurse entered the room. Twelve dollars for the Tylenol they gave me. The list went on and on. It was bill padding. I refused to pay. They bugged me for a few months and then finally offered to settle my bill for $257 before they would send it to a collection agency and ding my credit. I gladly paid a FAIR amount for the services I recieved.
The local hospital tried to charge me $1000 for six stiches in my hand about 12 years ago. It was a joke. I looked at the bill. They had three nurses take my pulse at different times while I waited in a room....they wanted to charge me $100 for each time the nurse entered the room. Twelve dollars for the Tylenol they gave me. The list went on and on. It was bill padding. I refused to pay. They bugged me for a few months and then finally offered to settle my bill for $257 before they would send it to a collection agency and ding my credit. I gladly paid a FAIR amount for the services I recieved.
OK stop talking when you have no idea what you are talkign about. This is why insruance gets a pass as they juts say its the lawyers faults and then Fox and republicans juts keep saying hopeing if they say it enough dumb people will believe it and then say it as well.
Here ya go... THE FACTS
- Punititive damages are awarded in less than one percent of medical malpractice cases (1).
This says that most lawsuits (more than 99%) don't involve "stupider" amounts of money. They are compensatory damages that are meant to do no more than "reimburse what you've lost."
- The National Practitioner Data Bank shows that bfive percent of doctors (one out of 20) are responsible for 54 percent of malpractice payouts (2).
We should focus on holding these major "malpractioners" accountable, rather than blaming the justice system that holds them responsible. When such a small number of doctors are responsible for such a large amount of malpractice suits, it becomes apparent that these cases are not simply groundless or greedy patients.
- In states that already limited awards for malpractice suits, there has been no decrease in the medical malpractice insurance that doctors pay (3).
I've sourced a composition that summarizes multiple studies of this behavior.
- Dartmouth College researchers have discovered that "medical malpractice payments have grown at about the same rate as health-care costs overall" while "malpractice insurance premiums for internists, general surgeons, and obstetricians have skyrocketed since 2000, jumping 20 to 25 percent in 2002 alone." (4)
In other words, the rise in malpractice insurance far outweigh the change in malpractice payments:
- In 2004, the Congressional Budget Office report found that:
And heres some more for ya...
1. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cfjs96.htm
Punitive damages are damages that are in excess of compensatory damages awarded to a plaintiff. They're designed to serve as a monetary punishment for the "malicious or wanton conduct" of the defendent.
2. National Practitioner Data Bank, Sept. 1, 1990 - Sept. 30, 2002
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Briefing_Book.pdf
3. The Kentucky Legislative Research Council discovered that capping punitive damage would continue to have little effect on physicians.
Quote :
"There was no evidence that premiums were lower when noneconomic damages are capped... Caps on punitive damage resulted in higher premiums for internists and general surgeons and fewer physicians in total for all three specialties."
Quote :
"At the same time, among the 19 states with caps, only two of the states, or 10.5 percent, experienced flat or declining med mal premiums. In contrast, states without caps were actually better able to contain premium rate increases, with six, or 18.7 percent, experiencing stable or declining trends.
"Tort reform has failed to address the problem of surging medical malpractice premiums, despite the fact that insurers have benefited from a slowdown in the growth of claims. The escalating medical malpractice crisis will not be resolved until the industry and regulators address the other, apparently more powerful, factors driving premiums higher."
http://www.citizen.org/congress/civjus/medmal/articles.cfm?ID=10038
4. http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/fall05/pdf/discoveries.pdf
Quote :
"The Dartmouth economists studied actual payments made to patients between 1991 and 2003, the results of which were published yesterday in the journal Health Affairs. Some previous studies have examined jury awards, which often are reduced after trial to comply with doctors' insurance coverage maximums or because the plaintiff settles for less money to avoid an appeal. Researchers found that payments grew an average of 4 percent annually during the years covered by the study, or 52 percent overall since 1991, but only 1.6 percent a year since 2000. The increases are roughly equivalent to the overall rise in healthcare costs, said Amitabh Chandra, lead author and an assistant professor of economics at the New Hampshire college?
Meanwhile, malpractice insurance premiums for internists, general surgeons, and obstetricians have skyrocketed since 2000, jumping 20 to 25 percent in 2002 alone?
''It's not payments that's causing this," Chandra said. ''The simple explanation that comes to mind is the underwriting cycle. If they're making less money from the investment side of things, it's going to cause [insurance companies] to raise rates.""
5. http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=4968&sequence=0
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