Losing your health insurance isn’t all bad. For one thing, you can finally afford to see a doctor.
The Joys of Being Uninsured
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I’ve wondered about this…we know prices are inflated and insurance is designed for profit, so how can it save us money? The seemingly absurd sentiment in the cartoon has to stop plenty of viewers and make them think.
Being young, I don’t really need much of any medical care. It’d have to be cheaper to pay out of pocket. Catastrophic health insurance perhaps? And I don’t want to hear the Obama tripe that I’m increasing the prices for everyone else when we full well know hospitals and insurance companies are the problem there.
Just an aside. I had a kidney stone out a couple years ago, with no insurance. My first adult trip to a hospital for anything significant. The anesthesiologist send me a bill. $1,666.67. If I paid $333.33 within 30 days, they would simply forgive the rest of the payment.
The entire bill? Counting payments for office visits (when the stone has come to rest and you aren’t in pain, they take a very conservative approach. Let’s try a bill that will make your ureters expand, possibly giving the stone enough room to shift. If that doesn’t work, let’s schedule you for the OR.) and the surgery, the whole thing was $9,000.
You do the math. A kidney stone removal is one of the most common procedures done. At $600 a month, my insurance, in order to break even, would have to have me not doing a single solitary thing medically for 15 months.
Does that seem even REMOTELY likely?
Right now, I keep wearing down my shoes on one side only. I would love to go to a podiatrist and have a professional take a look, to make sure I’m not doing irreparable damage to my knees or ankles (“Well, if you’d come to us 10 years ago, we could have done something to allow you to conserve your joints. Now, it’s just bone scraping bone. That’ll be $50,000 for the knee replacements vs. $500 for the special inserts for your shoes.”) but I can’t deal with a $1,000 bill.
If anyone knows a way to fix pronation, let me know. …
While you might not get the best care in the world, you’ll never pay more for it than in the USA.
The world’s most powerful military, most influential economy, and most expensive healthcare.
You had me worried there for a while, Ted – «paraneoplastic pemphigus» ? Then I looked it up and saw the the condition was first described in 1990, long after I finished my medical training and had to worry about obscure skin diseases, so I could once more put those concerns about failing memory and the onslaught of senility from my mind….
Henri