As a patent lawyer, just want to issue a friendly reminder that drug patents are mostly BS and there are like 5 better ways to more efficiently encourage drug discovery and innovation. The GOP can’t say no to Trump. You think they can say no to Big Pharma?
Yeah I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for private elder care per se… but there are going to need to be tens of thousands of different facilities built and maintained to meet demand. Replacing them with government run facilities would be a pretty major project. Also given the fact that they aren’t turning much of a profit they aren’t exactly low hanging fruit in terms of cutting back costs. You’d be hard pressed to cut costs much lower than they are presently in long term care.
You want to cut the medical costs of the elderly (and boy do we) you definitely want to start with drugs, unnecessary medical procedures, medical devices, and a great multitude of middlemen. Like I said earlier the long term care facilities are mostly run as a vector for these costs rather than a big source of them.
The reason why old people go into assisted living with 500k+ in assets and are on medicaid a year later is surgeries and meds. Yes they are being charged a couple of hundred bucks a day by the facility, but after you’ve paid for real estate, CNA’s, dietary, nurses, basic medical supplies, and lawsuits there is a surprisingly small pool of money left. Long term care just isn’t that great of a business, which from what I’ve seen makes it kind of an exception in the healthcare industry.
We definitely need to figure out how to fix long term care, but my guess is that it’s by paying the employees in them more and the drug companies, surgeons, and medical device companies a whole lot less. We’re underpaying the people who are mainly responsible for delivering good results and grossly overpaying everyone else basically. Obviously keeping the operators and administrators from larding up is going to be important as well.
FWIW it’s also terrible in the UK. There they don’t just underpay front line staff, they underpay everyone.
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Charge the people who did it with negligent homicide. Nothing is going to change in this country until the bad guys start going to jail.
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Whats the matter guys, don’t like the free marketplace of ideas?
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Will post some additional commentary on this in the Trump thread as it relates to the decision on his taxes.
Who else is doing their yearly signup for insurance through obamacare / healthcaredotgov?
I’m going to look through it either today or tomorrow, but I’ll probably stick with what I have. I don’t plan on being on a marketplace plan for much longer though.
My wife got a job so that we could have health insurance… so I’m spared the annual ritual where I make the conscious choice to raise my risk of financial ruin above 0% because I can’t bring myself to light 6-7k on fire for something that doesn’t even show a profit until I’ve spent 35k on healthcare expenses which is like a 1 in 15,000 event.
Essentially the price for two healthy adults has been so fucked it made more sense to wait until after we were already sick to buy insurance. It’s priced like you have some god awful chronic condition already lol. That’s what they meant by ‘we’ll cover preexisting conditions’ I guess.
Took our son to the children’s hospital emergency room a few weeks ago. It was a Saturday, primary care physician was closed. We went to urgent care first, but they said we should go to the emergency room because they weren’t equipped for what the tests he might need.
It did very much seem like an emergency situation. He’s fine, but it turned out it wasn’t a life or death thing. Going to the ER was probably the right move, particularly because they were able to identify the problem and treat it quite effectively.
Got the bill today. It was $4000+, insurance paid $1000. We’re still on the hook for fucking $3000.
My wife actually works in the insurance industry - she called the hospital to see what the uninsured rate was. It was only a couple hundred different. They couldn’t switch it, anyway, since it was already billed. We’re going to get on a payment plan, though, so that’s nice!
Good thing I declined the urgent care’s offer of an ambulance.
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Taken a few ambulances and always got hit for about a $1000 so yeah good move
Once you have a mortgage and a car, you really have no need for a good credit score and I would be highly tempted to tell these people to fuck off if I got one of these random $5k bills.
WTF
Yang came out with a more detailed healthcare plan, won’t be able to read it until tonight but thought I would plant it here.
https://www.yang2020.com/blog/a-new-way-forward-for-healthcare-in-america/
I like some of his ideas, but a fair bit of it seems to be nibbling around the edges and none of it shows how insurance premiums would go down. On the contrary, including mental health, dental care and all the rest would drive premiums up further.
Don’t get me wrong, including all of those things is super important and represents a major coverage gap here in Canada, but mandating that private insurance covers all that doesn’t seem feasible.
In many states they can turn these bills into judgments and then garnish bank accounts, wages and put liens on any real property you own so that is not really an option.
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