An Extra 5 Weeks of Pain

Jumping into the middle of the story, I tried cortisone injections to help with my chronic pain, but they only seem to have made things worse. A friend at church gave me a whole new approach to try, but I needed a referral from my primary care physician.

My PCP wouldn’t do the referral over email. She insisted that I needed to make an appointment, and that it had to be a 30-minute one. Because of the length of the appointment, I couldn’t get on her schedule for FIVE WEEKS. But I thought, hey, I have other requests. Maybe because I’m seeing her, she’ll address them.

I just had the appointment. She was 15 minutes late to a 30-minute appointment, and only used 10 minutes of the time. She told me she wouldn’t address my other concerns, and pushed them on the referral. She agreed that this was a good next step, but added 5 weeks of unnecessary extra time to my journey.

Obviously, I’m in a bad mood, and there’s just literally no comfort or rest to be found. Excuse me while I order a pizza, and stick my head inside a video game until I’m exhausted enough to go to sleep.

PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

“A state cannot simply commandeer private property to achieve its public policy goals,” said PhRMA’s complaint, filed Tuesday in district court. “The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from attempting to solve societal problems in this draconian manner.”

Source: PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

If their “alternatives” were working, people wouldn’t be dying from rationing insulin. The only thing “draconian” about this situation is the feudalistic caste system we seem to have recreated in modern America.

This country was started so that we wouldn’t have to live under the regime of a bunch of wealthy landowners who controlled the lives of those who worked their land. The large corporations — who don’t just control the means of production — but use the courts to prevent competition — get to unilaterally dictate their will to us serfs. This move is a complete abrogation of the implied social contract of a corporation. We wouldn’t even be in this position if they hadn’t been so greedy, and extracted so much from society for the past 5 decades.

Go ahead, I dare you to read up on how much money pharmaceutical companies have taken from the US government to develop all those medicines they advertise constantly on television, how much it costs to make them, and then how much they charge for them. The insurance companies have allowed this situation to develop, and get so bad that society cannot bear the weight of it any longer.

When the US finally adopts socialized medicine, the capitalism-lovers who wring their hands and call it communism will have nothing to blame except the corporatocracy that made it inevitable, and no one to blame except themselves for continuing to support a system that is leaving more and more people to fall through the cracks, and fend for themselves when they are the most vulnerable, until they become the majority, and vote with their pocketbooks to rebalance the equation.

Don’t tell me horror stories about health care systems in Canada or England. I hear horror stories from our own stupid system every single week, from rich and poor alike, and you do too, even if you ignore them.

True cost of Medicaid is 2X headline cost?

I recently attended a talk by the CEO of a hospital with $2.6 billion in annual revenue. She noted that patients on Medicaid are 40 percent of the census and that Medicaid pays only 50 percent of t…

Source: True cost of Medicaid is 2X headline cost?

This is a blog post from a professor at MIT, who explains that Medicaid is basically being HALF funded by overcharging people with private insurance. Also, here again, there’s anecdotal data that this is pushing people out of the private system, and into the public one, exacerbating the problem. I believe the private insurance system is teetering on the tipping point of collapse, where even people with “good” jobs won’t be able to afford it.
 
Cummins just announced a layoff that — reading between the lines — I *believe* is entirely related to health-care costs. Most people have absolutely no idea what their plan actually costs. The average cost of an insurance plan for a family is something like $20,000 year, and that’s for a huge company like Cummins, who can negotiate better rates with a huge insurance company. The average employee is only covering a portion of this.
 
If you estimate half of Cummins employees being in the US (say 30,000), and multiply this with the bulk of their health insurance premium (say $15,000), you come up with FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR of health care costs to the company. Half a BILLION dollars! On an EBITDA of $3B, that’s significant!
And that’s just the premiums! That’s not even counting all the administrative overhead to manage the program, or all the subsidiary efforts — like wellness programs and their new health center — designed to reduce health-care related costs, to TRY to keep the premiums manageable! And — as everyone LOVES to point out about corporate taxes — this astounding sum of money is simply passed on to customers in the cost of engines.
 
As more people get ejected from the private side, it drives up the costs even more, leading other companies to follow suit, and prices continuing to rise. Right now, even people with good jobs are opting for super-high-deductible plans, and, if they can’t cover a catastrophic situation, the system will try to recoup those costs from other people in the system, and this dance exacerbates the situation even further.
 
The ideal solution seems to be to get the government to allow me to buy health insurance like car insurance — with lots and lots of competition. Then employers can give me that $20,000, and let me go shop for it. I think the situation would sort itself out in no time. No, health care won’t suddenly be cheap, but I think the costs would get a lot more sane very quickly. At the least, I think that would end the $500 band-aids at the hospital.
 
But, no, the insurance companies like their profits too much to let the market reduce them, so they’re not going to let Congress do anything like this, and the system will fall over, and there won’t be any other choice left but to nationalize it all, and then Anthem suddenly becomes the largest organ of the government. And even though I think a “Pentagon of health care” is a workable backup idea, we all know that won’t happen either.

A Mexican Hospital, an American Surgeon, and a $5,000 Check (Yes, a Check) – The New York Times

In a new twist on medical tourism, a Denver company is tapping into this market. The company, North American Specialty Hospital, known as NASH, has organized treatment for a couple of dozen Americans at Galenia since 2017.

Source: A Mexican Hospital, an American Surgeon, and a $5,000 Check (Yes, a Check) – The New York Times

Given that more companies are starting to sink parasitic teeth into our horribly-overpriced health care system, I suppose some people will view this as a win for capitalism, but I think that’s a pretty sorry take.