As Hospital Prices Soar, a S ch Tops $500
With blood oozing from deep lacerations, the two patients arrived at California Pacific Medical Center’s tidy emergency room. Deepika Singh, 26, had gashed her knee at a backyard barbecue. Orla Roche, a rambunctious toddler on vacation with her family, had tumbled from a couch, splitting open her forehead on a table.
On a quiet Saturday in May, nurses in blue scrubs quickly ushered the two patients into treatment rooms. The wounds were cleaned, numbed and mended in under an hour. “It was great — they had good DVDs, the staff couldn’t have been nicer,” said Emer Duffy, Orla’s mother.
Then the bills arrived. Ms. Singh’s three s ches cost $2,229.11. Orla’s forehead was sealed with a dab of skin glue for $1,696. “When I first saw the charge, I said, ‘What could possibly have cost that much?’ ” recalled Ms. Singh. “They billed for everything, every pill.”
In a medical system notorious for opaque finances and inflated bills, nothing is more convoluted than hospital pricing, economists say. Hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.
A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital costs on average more than $4,000, five times the charge in many other developed countries, according to the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurance industries. The most expensive hospitals charge more than $12,500 a day. And at many of them, including California Pacific Medical Center, emergency rooms are profit centers. That is why one of the simplest and oldest medical procedures — closing a wound with a needle and thread — typically leads to bills of at least $1,500 and often much more.
At Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Daniel Diaz, 29, a public relations executive, was billed $3,355.96 for five s ches on his finger after cutting himself while peeling an avocado. At a hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., Arch Roberts Jr., 56, a former government employee, was charged more than $2,000 for three s ches after being bitten by a dog. At Mercy Hospital in Port Huron, Mich., Chelsea Manning, 22, a student, received bills for close to $3,000 for six s ches after she tripped running up a path. Insurers and patients negotiated lower prices, but those charges were a starting point.
The main reason for high hospital costs in the United States, economists say, is fiscal, not medical: Hospitals are the most powerful players in a health care system that has little or no price regulation in the private market.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/03...?from=homepage
black Jesus has ed the Repugs and tea baggers by providing millions of uninsured Americans access to health care, reducing the price of insurance in the individual market, bending down the curve of the greedy health care scam.
Repugs will pay dearly electorally in 2014, 2016, and beyond because of ACA. Then add in Asians, women, Latinos, blacks, the young voting by a huge majority with the Dems, you assholes and your asshole politicians are ed.
Rep. Mike Rogers: Obamacare isn’t worth helping the ‘few’ 48 million uninsured
“You’re punishing these people,” Rogers told NBC host David Gregory. “Here’s the problem, you have 15 percent of the population that didn’t have health insurance when this started, roughly — and we think that number was high, we think it was closer to 10. So what they’ve done is disrupted it for the 85 percent that had health care. And their costs are going up significantly.”
“So we’ve broken the system to help a few,” he insisted. “Nobody would fix a problem that way.”
“The reality is that it hasn’t messed up 80 percent of the market,” Van Hollen explained. “The individual market, which has always been broken, represents about 5 percent of the market. A lot of those people were losing their health care on an annual basis before. We’re trying to fix that.”
According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report, 48 million Americans were uninsured in 2012. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 25 million of those people will be covered by 2023 because of the new law.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/01/rep-mike-rogers-obamacare-isnt-worth-helping-the-few-48-million-uninsured/
Regugs got NOTHING BUT LIES, from Boner, Issa, Ryan, on down, NOTHING BUT LIES.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-04-2013 at 06:26 AM.
Smerconish was on MSNBC last night. As self-employed with a wife and 3 children in a state w/o an exchange, he's been pissing on healtcare.gov since 1 Oct when we got up at 5 AM to shop.
But last night on TV, he said the site works great for him, the price range is basically $1000 to $2000/month (he makes too much for subsidy, etc), while he has been paying $2200.
Repugs preaching more LIES, very probably dissuading their right-to-work-for-less, low-wage, unemployed redneck choir from getting health care
GOP: HealthCare.gov Might Be Fixed, But Obamacare Still Sucks
Republicans aren't impressed with the Obama administration's claim that HealthCare.gov is now effectively fixed. That's not really the issue, they've started to say. No, the problem is canceled policies, lost doctors and higher premiums. Who cares if the website is working?
That is a far cry from the early days of October when a dysfunctional website was "proof" that Obamacare "has been an unmitigated disaster" in the words of House Speaker John Boehner in an Oct. 4 statement.
But that's no longer the preferred talking point. Instead, the GOP has become enamored with insurance cancellations that they say violate President Obama's "if you like your health plan, you can keep it" promise and claims of rate shock. Boehner reinforced that shift at his most recent press conference.
"It's not just a broken website," he said Tuesday. "This bill is fundamentally flawed, causing people to lose the doctor of their choice, causing them to lose their health plan, and if that's not enough, they have to pay more in premiums."
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) echoed the same point moments later.
"While the White House wants to claim that HealthCare.gov is now working, we know that Obamacare is still plagued with problems," he said. "This is not something that is helping Americans. It is harming people who need help most right now."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-...egov-who-cares
Amazing, just like the dubya's era, black is white, down is up, bad is good, as told by the Repug Ministry of Truth.
ACA is ing the Repugs hard and deep, and they know that their own TRUE electoral/demographic trainwreck is hurtling down the tracks straight at them.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-04-2013 at 10:24 AM.
I really enjoyed the Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, although I'm weary of Mark Walberg playing his character in the upcoming film. Walberg is not 6'4 230 lbs.
Poll: Americans More Concerned With Job Creation Than Obamacare Woes
According to a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll released Monday, an overwhelming majority of Americans want Congress and President Barack Obama to focus on job creation more than any other issue — including health care.
The poll finds that by more than a 3-1 margin, voters would be “very pleased” or “somewhat pleased,” if the president and Congress worked together to create more jobs, as opposed to “very disappointed” or “somewhat disappointed.” Surprisingly, voters expressed very little partisan variation on how they hope the president and lawmakers create more jobs; 75 percent say they would be “pleased” or “very pleased” if jobs were created by reducing taxes and regulation – generally a Republican position – and 77 percent said the same about increasing investment in infrastructure projects, which Democrats tend to favor.
The findings should serve as a wakeup call for congressional Republicans, who have dedicated a great amount of their time to attacking the Affordable Care Act and its troubled rollout, and now say there is little left for them to do anything else.
According to The New York Times, U.S. Representative Reid Ribble (R-WI) even claimed that his cons uents would not “want me to be overaggressive in writing new laws.” The new poll suggests that his cons uents would disagree
http://www.nationalmemo.com/poll-ame...bamacare-woes/
Repugs WILLFULLY ignoring their cons uents' priorities, Dems not any better, but Dems know the Repugs will obstruct any job creation/economy stimulus, so what's the point?
I'm pretty sure Americans have been more concerned with job creation since 2008, but BHO needed his signature P.O.S. law that nobody cared about. Lol.
you conveniently forget that you assholes and Repugs were screaming HYPERINFLATION, etc when Dems were shooting for a bigger stimulus, y'all parrots kept the stimulus too small for the depth of the Banksters Great Depression, and kept all further stimulus foreclosed on as the Repugs tried hard to screw up/depress the economy to defeat Obama/Dems in 2012.
Sure enough, the Repugs were hitting the Dems with "Where are the jobs?" but the Repugs were guilty of killing the stimulus AND not proposing any job creation bills.
so, GFY
Shovel-ready
But, hey, a website where you can barely create an account, can't shop, leaves your personal information vulnerable, and has no mechanism for paying -- who wouldn't want to sign up for that?
your information is out of date, but keep it up, you lying assholes are looking sillier by the day
Obamacare Not The First New Program To Have Launch Problems
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...n_4148466.html
Here's how the Repug Corporate Welfare FOR-PROFIT Medicare works, while costing taxpayers 10%+ more than govt Medicare:
Why Consumers Disenroll from Medicare Private Health Plans
There are various reasons why consumers disenroll from a Medicare private health plan.
According to the data from our cases,
provider access problems,
misinformation and marketing misconduct,
as well as coverage denials for medical services
are the most prevalent reasons for disenrollment, followed by
complaints about high cost-sharing,
coverage denials for prescription drugs and
premium increases.
By understanding the reasons behind disenrollments, policymakers can identify problems both with the Medicare Advantage program as a whole and with
individual plans.
For example, a high proportion of consumers who disenroll after joining as a result of
misleading or abusive marketing, as this report finds, indicates the need for stepped-up
oversight of plans’ marketing conduct. If a large portion of a plan’s enrollees disenroll and
cite the cost of medical care as a reason, it may indicate that the cost-sharing structure
under the plan is poorly suited to the needs of the Medicare population.
This report presents useful data on the reasons consumers disenroll from Medicare private health
plans, but is not representative on a plan-specific basis. Such data would be useful to both
consumers and policymakers; this report’s principal recommendation is for CMS to resume
collecting and publishing plan-specific data on consumers’ reasons for disenrollment. CMS
has indicated it plans to reinstate a survey on reasons underlying disenrollment in late
summer 2010, although it has not publicly committed to resuming the survey on a
permanent basis or to providing the results to consumers.4
http://www.medicarerights.org/pdf/Wh...ll-from-MA.pdf
Did Medicare Part D have the same rollout problems as the Obamacare online marketplaces?
Big programs have seen rocky rollouts only to achieve success later, they say. Their top example:the 2005 launch of Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan.
"Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out," Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told MSNBC on Nov. 6. "When things go wrong, there are two things we can do as a country. We can spend all our time figuring out who to blame, or we can spend all our time figuring out how to fix it."
Eight years after it went live, Medicare Part D is now widely popular among the seniors who use it.
Were there major problems with the rollout of Medicare Part D? And were they comparable to the challenges facing Obamacare? We decided to take a more a detailed look at its implementation.
Strangely similar
Let’s play a quick game: who made this statement?
"This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches."
A Democrat in 2013? Wrong!Actually, it wasRep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, about Medicare Part D in 2006.
The similarities between the two health care programs, both heralded as the signature domestic achievements of the presidents who signed them into law, are at times eerie. Supporters of the laws asked for time and promised a quick fix. Critics did not mince their words. Even the lingo -- words like "glitches" -- has been recycled.
A report do enting the history of Medicare Part D was released earlier this year bya group of health policy experts at the Center on Health Insurance Reform at Georgetown University. It highlighted several areas where Medicare Part D struggled in its implementation that sound extremely familiar.
For one thing, the Bush administration faced a difficult political battle to get the bill passed in 2003. That damaged public opinion of the law, making it a challenge to educate 43 million seniors on its nuances.
Enrollment in the law was set to begin in late 2005. In April of that year, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 27 percent of respondents understood the law, while only 21 percent favored it. (In a comparable Kaiser poll in April 2013, 35 percent viewed the Affordable Care Act favorably and less than half felt they were well-informed of its details.)
The Medicare site, meant to help seniors pick benefit plans, was supposed to debut Oct. 13, 2005, but it didn’tgo live until weeks later in November. Even then, "the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing," the Washington Post reported at the time.
"Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly," the Post reported. (Sensing a pattern?)
Once seniors began to enroll, problems persisted. According to the report, the online tools had "accuracy problems," and local organizations designated with assisting seniors "reported problems getting necessary and accurate information." Call centers provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services underestimated "the needed capacity to ensure that reliable answers could be provided" and "service representatives were not knowledgeable or failed to provide accurate information."
The Georgetown experts anticipated similar hiccups with the Affordable Care Act, noting that the country’s experience with Medicare Part D suggested "the experience will be far from perfect" and "problems were not always addressed as quickly or as thoroughly as critics would have liked, but fixes were usually found."
These days,nine in 10 seniors who utilize the program report they are satisfied with it.
"There’s really a striking amount of similarity even though this time it’s a far larger and daunting task. It’s a fair comparison," said Jack Hoadley at the Georgetown University's Health Policy Ins ute and one of the authors of the study. "Once something works its way through the problems, you forget the problems."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...alth-care-gov/
So you right wing assholes have been duped and conscripted by the Repug LIE machine to parrot ignorantly Repug LIES
In Nevada, where pros ution is legal, pros utes are signing up for Obamacare...
Which explains why the most popular pick-up line in Nevada is, "Let me help you with your co-pay."
why the Repugs and VRWC push so hard for total privatization
Think the E.R. Was Expensive? Look at How Much It Cost to Get There
Kira Milas has no idea who called 911, summoning an ambulance filled with emergency medical technicians. Ms. Milas, 23, was working as a swim instructor for the summer and had swum into the side of the pool, breaking three teeth.
Shaken, she accepted the ambulance ride to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, Calif. The paramedics applied a neck brace as a precaution.
A week later she received a bill for the 15-minute trip: $1,772.42. Though her employer’s workers’ compensation will cover the bill, she still was stunned at the charge. “We only drove nine miles and it was a non-life-threatening injury,” she said in a phone interview. “I needed absolutely no emergency treatment.”
Thirty years ago ambulance rides were generally provided free of charge, underwritten by taxpayers as a municipal service or provided by volunteers. Today, like the rest of the health care system in the United States, most ambulance services operate as businesses and contribute to America’s escalating medical bills. Often, they are a high-cost prequel to expensive emergency room visits.
Although ambulances are often requested by a bystander or summoned by 911 dispatchers, they are almost always billed to the patient involved. And the charges, as well as insurance coverage, range widely, from zero to tens of thousands of dollars.
“There are a significant numbers of patients who have no coverage for this, and the number of self-pay patients has climbed” since the recession, said Jay Fitch, president of Fitch and Associates, the largest emergency medical services consulting firm in the United States.
What is more, since ambulances companies typically collect only 30 to 40 percent of the amount they bill, they often try to charge more for patients with insurance and those who can pay, Mr. Fitch said.
Part of the inconsistency in pricing stems from the fact that ambulance services are variously run by fire departments, hospitals, private companies and volunteer groups. Some services are included in insurance networks, others not.
In a recent study, the federal Health and Human Services Department’s Office of the Inspector General noted that the Medicare ambulance services were “vulnerable to abuse and fraud,” in part because there were lax standards on when an ambulance was needed and how the trip should be billed. The number of transports paid for by Medicare increased 69 percent between 2002 and 2011, while the number of Medicare patients increased only 7 percent during that period. In the last year, two ambulance companies have pleaded guilty or settled claims for overbilling Medicare.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/05...?from=homepage
iow, just more wealth-sucking kludgeocracy courtesy of for-profit health care.
from an email from DCCC
"This week, Speaker Boehner got caught red-handed.
He just couldn’t stop himself from promoting the latest fake Obamacare “horror story.”
This one’s about a New York father who was allegedly told that his 18-month-old daughter couldn't be included on the family’s plan. Boehner actually insinuated that Obamacare would only cover children once they reach two years of age.
Well guess what, the story AND Boehner’s claim are 100% false.
The New York father, who is a failed conservative candidate for the state legislature, forgot to list one of his children on his plan and the error has already been resolved.
But Boehner hasn't made a statement to set the record straight."
Republicans Revive Mitt Romney’s Favorite Medicare Attack
With HealthCare.gov substantially improved and new insurance signups surging, Republicans have been forced to pivot to a new line of attack against the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a series of news releases accusing Democratic candidates of cutting Medicare through their support of the health care reform law.
“As the ObamaCare disaster continues to unfold, Mark Pryor and National Democrats have resorted to deceiving seniors using their old and discredited MediScare playbook,” reads the release targeting Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR).
“What’s new this year is the blatant hypocrisy that Mark Pryor and his liberal allies in Washington are exhibiting,” it continues. “Pryor’s deciding vote for ObamaCare cut $717 billion from Medicare—including nearly $5.4 billion directly from Arkansas ($10,296 per Medicare recipient in Arkansas).”
CNN reports that the NRSC campaign will target Senators Pryor, Mark Begich (D-AK), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), Durbin (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Al Franken (D-MN), along with Senate candidates Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) and Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI).
If this line of attack sounds familiar, it’s because it was a centerpiece of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s case against the Affordable Care Act in the 2012 elections. The Republican ticket repeatedly accused President Obama of having “robbed” and “raided” $716 billion from Medicare to “pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven, federal takeover of health care.”
Of course, that attack ignored the fact that the overwhelming majority of the $716 billion actually represented reductions in how much Medicare pays hospitals and insurers, as WonkBlog’s Sarah Kliff explained last August. Medicare benefits themselves are not affected.
It also ignored the fact that Ryan’s own budget included the exact same $716 billion in cuts (with the implied promise of deeper cuts in the future to pay for trillions of dollars in new defense spending and tax cuts). He has also kept the savings in subsequent budget proposals. Nearly every Republican in Congress — including Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Pryor’s chief rival in his 2014 re-election bid — has supported Ryan’s budget plans, significantly blunting the accusation’s impact.
Nonetheless, House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) spokesman Brendan Buck told MSNBC that the attack is
“a tried and true campaign hit” — ignoring that it totally failed to blunt the Democratic Party’s sweeping victory in 2012.
There’s no denying that Republicans had a good political month targeting the Affordable Care Act’s rocky rollout. But the fact that they are already returning to this easily debunked attack, which was proven to be unpersuasive in the last election, raises the question of whether they are running out of fresh attacks against the law. And with repeal seemingly off the table, one wonders where Republicans will turn if good news about the law continues to trickle out.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/republic...dicare-attack/
Repugs are so slapped!
Walberg was decent in shooter. Maybe he won't be so bad.
Poor Walberg being forced to pay for the incompetents insurance.
The desperate attempts by bots like boutons to polish this turd are amusing.
Op-Ed Columnist
Obamacare’s Secret Success
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 28, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/op...cess.html?_r=0Since 2010, when the act was passed, real health spending per capita — that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth — has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn’t risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.
What could account for this good news? One obvious answer is the still-depressed economy, which might be causing people to forgo expensive medical care. But this explanation turns out to be problematic in multiple ways. For one thing, the economy had stabilized by 2010, even if the recovery was fairly weak, yet health costs continued to slow. For another, it’s hard to see why a weak economy would have more effect in reducing the prices of health services than it has on overall inflation. Finally, Medicare spending shouldn’t be affected by the weak economy, yet it has slowed even more dramatically than private spending.
A better story focuses on what appears to be a decline in some kinds of medical innovation — in particular, an absence of expensive new blockbuster drugs, even as existing drugs go off-patent and can be replaced with cheaper generic brands. This is a real phenomenon; it is, in fact, the main reason the Medicare drug program has ended up costing less than originally projected. But since drugs are only about 10 percent of health spending, it can only explain so much.
So what aspects of Obamacare might be causing health costs to slow? One clear answer is the act’s reduction in Medicare “overpayments” — mainly a reduction in the subsidies to private insurers offering Medicare Advantage Plans, but also cuts in some provider payments. A less certain but likely source of savings involves changes in the way Medicare pays for services. The program now penalizes hospitals if many of their patients end up being readmitted soon after being released — an indicator of poor care — and readmission rates have, in fact, fallen substantially. Medicare is also encouraging a shift from fee-for-service, in which doctors and hospitals get paid by the procedure, to “accountable care,” in which health organizations get rewarded for overall success in improving care while controlling costs.
Furthermore, there’s evidence that Medicare savings “spill over” to the rest of the health care system — that when Medicare manages to slow cost growth, private insurance gets cheaper, too.
And the biggest savings may be yet to come. The Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel with the power to impose cost-saving measures (subject to Congressional overrides) if Medicare spending grows above target, hasn’t yet been established, in part because of the near-certainty that any appointments to the board would be filibustered by Republicans yelling about “death panels.” Now that the filibuster has been reformed, the board can come into being.
The news on health costs is, in short, remarkably good. You won’t hear much about this good news until and unless the Obamacare website gets fixed. But under the surface, health reform is starting to look like a bigger success than even its most ardent advocates expected.
The turds around here are you right-wing monkeys and the you hurl, on command by your thought dictators, at any target the Repugs try lessly to attack.
And, if needed, Mythbusters showed turds can be highly polished.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-05-2013 at 06:13 AM.
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