Siope
I want to add something
Re Part A deductibles/excess costs. There are no limits to the number of benefit periods in a year. So if you were in hospital three times, for even two days each time, you’d pay close $5000 just for being there.
Thanks Siope for those informative posts on Medicare.
So if you were in hospital three times, for even two days each time, you’d pay close $5000 just for being there.
The layers of admin necessary to process all these co-pays, deductibles, extra costs, must be quite heavy - not least for the individual.
So what happens if, for example, someone's income is so low that it is accounted for the moment it arrives in the bank account and there is no $5000 that can be spared to cover these hospital admissions?
I think I now understand the collective 'American' attitude towards healthcare (obviously excluding those who don't subscribe to it) which is so different to ours here in the UK.
Chatting to an American work colleague many years ago whilst he was on a visit to the company I worked for, when this subject came up in conversation - he said that healthcare was a privilege not a right. Further discussion revealed he believed that if you couldn't afford it then, like any other commodity, you couldn't have it. And he thought that was quite fair. I think that is the difference in our cultures regarding healthcare, and why so many Americans are horrified at the concept of it being "socialised".
A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.”
(from an editorial in The New York Times)
(Martin Shkreli is an American investor and businessman. He was convicted of financial crimes for which he served over six years in federal prison and was fined over 70 million dollars.)
(from Wiki)
American Capitalism is pretty brutal.