I said before in another post why do we always attack on the insurance side of the issue.

Give me a reason why a 4 or 5 day hospital stay should cost $40,000

My son spent the first week of his life in NICU. 130,000 in 2004.

You get billed for $40,000 (or more), but that is not what it cost. Billing is padded to accommodate a number of hands being held out. First, it includes extra money to be spread among insurance companies and administrators. Then there is a built-in cushion to help defray the cost of emergency care the hospital has to give but they know they will never get paid for.

I had two 3-day stays in hospitals involving operations last year, one in a top clinic in Germany, the other in Dallas. The bill for the German treatment was 9000 euros, about $11,000. The bill in Dallas was $35,000 which was "discounted" to $26,500, something I still don't understand. The care was NOT three times better in Dallas than it was in Düsseldorf, and the costs of care providing in Germany are certainly not two thirds less than they are in Texas.

At a meeting in Washington in July where this was discussed in detail, one wealthy woman told of a relative who was visiting her from South America. While in the USA, her relative had a heart attack, and required ten days' hospitalization. The bill came: $70,000. The woman called the hospital and told them she would pay it up front if they would discount the bill. The hospital told her that they did give discounts in such cases, but ONLY to insurance companies, never to individuals. Go figure.

To get Medicaid you have to be on SSI. When you become eligible for Early Retirement Social Security, you are kicked off SSI losing Medicaid. Then you have to go without until you get Medicare at 65. Between 62 and 65 you are SOL.

I should qualify this with, "In my experience."

Edit to add.

I am not familiar with the SSDI route. There are some gotchas there too.

It starts with a profit-driven lifestyle.

* We eat a shitty, low nutrition diet. Sugar, meat and nutrition-poor concentrates instead of the high-nutrition foods that our bodies need for sustenance. All so that somebody else can get rich.

* We are trained in school to be factory workers, living by an unnatural clock that contradicts what our natural circadian cycles need.

* We then either spend decades working in physical factories, repeating the same motions over and over, breaking down various body parts. Or we spend decades working in office factories, sitting in front of typewriters or now computers, attached to phones, getting little movement at all, rusting into place. We breathe unnatural, unhealthy air and work in unnatural, harsh light. All so that somebody else can get rich.

* When we get minor injuries or illnesses, we are encouraged (and now required by circumstances) to take pills and get back to work, instead of giving our bodies the rest and nutrition they need to heal.

* When we subsequently get seriously injured or ill, we stay in a high-tech hospital. The expenses have to be astronomical. When you are behind the scenes you begin to understand why. We have to prevent germs from spreading from one patient to the next, and protect ourselves from exposure to patients' very transmissible germs. We change gloves after each patient. In the lab, gloves on to handle specimens. Gloves off at the computer. Gloves on for another batch of specimens. Gloves off at the computer. I probably go through 1/2+ boxes of gloves in 8 hours. All of those little tubes we fill with your blood get destroyed afterwards. Those tubes contain expensive chemicals and have exact vacuum pressure to fill to an exact amount. They are not cheap. All the cups you pee into are destroyed afterwards. They are sterilized and sealed in plastic wrap until we give them to you. The blue gowns and feet we wear into the OR or into a tb patient's room are thrown out afterwards. All those things aren't just thrown out; they are disposed as hazardous waste. Cleaning the sheets isn't the same as regular laundry; everything is potentially hazardous and has to be treated as such. The instruments are expensive, both in the lab and the computers that monitor a patient's vital signs, IV, etc. The documentation requirements are enormous. Paperless my ass. Speaking of which, due to the stakes, CYA adds to the expenses. The energy use in a hospital is like an office building or factory on steroids.

*When people without health insurance come to the ER instead of a walk-in clinic, they are getting people trained and experienced with trauma or stabilizing acute symptoms until the patient can be moved out of the ER, not GPs, oncologists, pediatriciansetc. Therefore, they won't necessarily get a correct diagnosis. They'll get a battery of tests, symptomatic treatment, and either admitted or sent home.

Factories are efficient until they're not. What I mean by that is, they enable rapid processing of large numbers of whatever, allowing the profits to be channeled into a single direction, while the follow-on cleanup costs get channeled into a different direction. Someone profits at somebody else's expense. In the process, they are enormously wasteful of resources, including human resource units.

yes, we eat a shitty diet and yes it's pushed on us from all sides.

No, we aren't trained to be factory workers. If only. We are set up to be service sector workers at a far lower wage than factory workers.

You seem to be stuck in a time warp. I'm certainly not saying things are any better but the types of jobs you think prevail, don't. they've been disappearing for years.

Whether it's a factory assembly line, or a service assembly line, it is still an assembly line to produce a product or service or service/product. To me, it is all factory work. Either assembling a product or delivering the product to the customer in exchange for money, all pre-programmed, repetitive actions.

In my life, I have worked flipping burgers (the fast-food service factory or assembly line), secretary (service assembly line/factory), admin assist (service assembly line/factory), project manager (product assembly line/factory), marketing communications manager (brochure and data sheet assembly line/factory), documentation specialist (service/product assembly line/factory), budget specialists (service assembly line/factory), etc.

Right now, after very expensive and intensive training, I work in a hospital laboratory, a service assembly line/factory. Specimens come in batches, we process them, run tests, review the results against diagnosis and patient history to ensure they make sense, and then report results (unless they don't make sense, in which case we investigate). We maintain the machines that do the tests, calibrating and running QC on them, replenish and replace chemicals, manually clean various parts, run automated clean cycles, etc. It is a health care factory that provides a service/product. The product is the test result. The service is collection of the specimen and delivery of the test result.

The pay is higher in the laboratory assembly line/factory than it is assembling hamburger products or running the cash register at the burger service/product factory. But not even close to high enough to justify the education needed to do it.

that is how poor it has been at communicating their programs, imo.

Of course they couldn't communicate to every potential uninsured patient what they are eligible for, or when. But certainly every hospital and clinic should have been given specific, clear instructions on eligibility so that when uninsured patients show up in the ER they can be treated as required by law and simultaneously handed a piece of paper advising where to go to get themselves onto whatever insurance is available to them.

The same was true of the income-based student loan repayment programs. I was on the brink before I learned by "word of mouth" from a former DUer about the program. Had I known about it 2 years sooner, I would have dropped out of school and stayed at my old job, and would be in much better financial and personal shape today instead of barely treading water.

And the same is also true of the student loan interest rate cut. I got Stafford loans for 3 years, between 2008 and 2011, at 6.8%. Now I hear about them fighting to *keep* the reduction at 3.4%. Huh? Why was I charged 6.8% with standard Stafford loans when they were supposedly cut to 3.4%?

Again, all colleges and universities should have known about both those programs and been required to pass that info onto students when they applied for loans and when their loan payments were ending, as appropriate.

This problem isn't limited to this administration, either. There's a low income property tax rebate program in my state. God forbid they should name it the property tax rebate program. They call it the "circuit breaker" program. I saw the brochure standing in line at the town offices and assumed it was about getting circuit breakers to prevent fires (rural area with a lot of antiques that haven't been updated since the 40s). I had nothing to do in line, so picked it up to read it; it turned out I could have saved several thousand dollars over the several years my income has been in the toilet.

It's designed to kill off the poor. Quietly.