September 8, 2009
It's diabolical, really. The people who most need healthcare reform are the least able to lobby for it. If you’ve been following my blog, it’s no secret that I have kidney failure. I work fulltime in order to have health insurance to pay for dialysis and, hopefully one day, a kidney transplant. You may have noted this is my first blog in several months. Why? For the same reason I have not paid my way in the healthcare reform debate; I have a limited bank of energy and truthfully, I’m overdrawn.
Speaking of “overdrawn,” please allow me to use a personal example of the absurdity of our current system. My dialysis provider charges my insurance $10,000 a week, or $520,000 a year for my treatments. For the exact same services, my dialysis provider charges a Medicare patient around $1,000 dollars a week, or $52,000 a year.
Did I lose you yet? That’s $520,000 versus $52,000 a year for the exact same services. Ten to freaking one? How can this be? In what universe does this make any sense?
What’s happening here is that the dialysis company doesn’t make profit from Medicare patients. They break even. Therefore, the 10x from my insurance company provides the profit and subsidizes the Medicare patients. Sound absurd? Why would my health insurance company tolerate this? They tolerate this because at the end of a 30 month “coordination period” they get to turf me to Medicare. With the average transplant waiting list time up to 5-7 years and transplant costs averaging $250,000, thirty months of being overcharged is almost equitable. See http://www.transplantliving.org/beforethetransplant/finance/costs.aspx.
Folks, this is how the system distributes the pain of critically ill people. They call this “cost shifting” and this is just one of a thousand examples that reveal the house of cards used to construct our health care system. Cost shifting hides the true cost of illness, creates billing hot potatoes, and, last of all, it still fails the uninsured, the poor, and the unlucky. What’s worse is that cost shifting causes insurance companies, doctors, pharmacies, etc to raise premiums, prices and service fees. The truth is you pay for Medicare and the uninsured regardless of what you think. The money hides as fat in your premiums and payments. Pundits and industry wonks constantly debate cost shifting and its relation to Medicare. Some companies who have figured out how to work the system to their advantage have hired economists to bust the myth of cost shifting or discount it as a very small problem. Here’s my one word response: bullshit. Cost-shifting is real and pervasive.
You may have missed a tidbit from my true-to-life example above. Yes, I am 42 and am on Medicare. Does this surprise you? In 1972, the Social Security Act extended Medicare to anyone with End Stage Renal Disease as long as they paid into the Social Security system. A public option does exist today. You just need to be a special case to get it before you are 65. Truthfully, isn’t everyone a special case? Legally, aren’t we all of equal value? A lackey from my dialysis center actively discouraged me from signing up for Medicare early. She said “the company” wouldn’t like it. I’m sure they wouldn’t - they’re like all other companies whose sole purpose is to maximize profits and return dividends to investors.
Why shouldn’t you have the opportunity to choose the public option? The public option seems to be very good at setting price ceilings and eliminating excessive profits. It incentivizes efficiency. Let me be clear, profit can be a good thing that spurs innovation. However, it needs to be above board and visible. Why do we allow medical finance to hide behind all these twists and turns?
Matt Tiabbi of Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the whole health care reform disaster, at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/1. He brings up the point that America has 1300 different insurance companies all with different billing procedures and policies. They estimate a single-payer system would eliminate 350 billion dollars of needless overhead. This is more than enough money to pay for healthcare reform.
It's diabolical, really. The people who most need healthcare reform are the least able to lobby for it. If you’ve been following my blog, it’s no secret that I have kidney failure. I work fulltime in order to have health insurance to pay for dialysis and, hopefully one day, a kidney transplant. You may have noted this is my first blog in several months. Why? For the same reason I have not paid my way in the healthcare reform debate; I have a limited bank of energy and truthfully, I’m overdrawn.
Speaking of “overdrawn,” please allow me to use a personal example of the absurdity of our current system. My dialysis provider charges my insurance $10,000 a week, or $520,000 a year for my treatments. For the exact same services, my dialysis provider charges a Medicare patient around $1,000 dollars a week, or $52,000 a year.
Did I lose you yet? That’s $520,000 versus $52,000 a year for the exact same services. Ten to freaking one? How can this be? In what universe does this make any sense?
What’s happening here is that the dialysis company doesn’t make profit from Medicare patients. They break even. Therefore, the 10x from my insurance company provides the profit and subsidizes the Medicare patients. Sound absurd? Why would my health insurance company tolerate this? They tolerate this because at the end of a 30 month “coordination period” they get to turf me to Medicare. With the average transplant waiting list time up to 5-7 years and transplant costs averaging $250,000, thirty months of being overcharged is almost equitable. See http://www.transplantliving.org/beforethetransplant/finance/costs.aspx.
Folks, this is how the system distributes the pain of critically ill people. They call this “cost shifting” and this is just one of a thousand examples that reveal the house of cards used to construct our health care system. Cost shifting hides the true cost of illness, creates billing hot potatoes, and, last of all, it still fails the uninsured, the poor, and the unlucky. What’s worse is that cost shifting causes insurance companies, doctors, pharmacies, etc to raise premiums, prices and service fees. The truth is you pay for Medicare and the uninsured regardless of what you think. The money hides as fat in your premiums and payments. Pundits and industry wonks constantly debate cost shifting and its relation to Medicare. Some companies who have figured out how to work the system to their advantage have hired economists to bust the myth of cost shifting or discount it as a very small problem. Here’s my one word response: bullshit. Cost-shifting is real and pervasive.
You may have missed a tidbit from my true-to-life example above. Yes, I am 42 and am on Medicare. Does this surprise you? In 1972, the Social Security Act extended Medicare to anyone with End Stage Renal Disease as long as they paid into the Social Security system. A public option does exist today. You just need to be a special case to get it before you are 65. Truthfully, isn’t everyone a special case? Legally, aren’t we all of equal value? A lackey from my dialysis center actively discouraged me from signing up for Medicare early. She said “the company” wouldn’t like it. I’m sure they wouldn’t - they’re like all other companies whose sole purpose is to maximize profits and return dividends to investors.
Why shouldn’t you have the opportunity to choose the public option? The public option seems to be very good at setting price ceilings and eliminating excessive profits. It incentivizes efficiency. Let me be clear, profit can be a good thing that spurs innovation. However, it needs to be above board and visible. Why do we allow medical finance to hide behind all these twists and turns?
Matt Tiabbi of Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the whole health care reform disaster, at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/1. He brings up the point that America has 1300 different insurance companies all with different billing procedures and policies. They estimate a single-payer system would eliminate 350 billion dollars of needless overhead. This is more than enough money to pay for healthcare reform.
Why are we allowing the House, Senate and President Obama to take the single-payer system and the public option off the table? There will be no true reform without both. You know and I know it. The time for silence is over. It’s time for the sick to rise up and speak before it’s too late.
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