Because I have multiple family members involved in this business. Because of the existence of the careers medical biller and medical coder and the many 3rd party billing companies. How do you think the billing information gets entered into the computer for the electronic claims? What happens when the claims forms change, as they do periodically, but some of the insurance companies aren’t set up to handle them yet? What happens when you get a provider that you aren’t set up for electronic billing with? What happens when insurance companies kick back a code that they previously paid on or under-pay for it? What happens when each provider uses a slightly different code for payment? Someone needs to deal with all of these issues and many more that I haven’t listed.
Again, it’s possible that a small doctors offices has an office manager who handles these things. But any midsized practice, and every surgery center or hospital has many people doing this kind of job.
I’ll see your Northern Canada and raise you Alaska. A Canadian can correct me, but I very much doubt the needs of the Yukon and northern Canadians drove the adoption of UHC in Canada. They don’t have a lot of votes, for one thing.
Do you have a cite on how many older people irresponsibly reject health insurance? I don’t have a choice at my company - I can choose the high or low option, but I have to have it.
How many people going bankrupt due to insurance have 3 SUVs vs being working poor with no or inadequate insurance? How many had savings that were used up in the first bout of illness? How much money and education does a person have to have to be worth something in your eyes? Is the nice woman who cleans the bathrooms at work, and who probably doesn’t get health insurance, irresponsible because I doubt she’d be very good at computer design? I was lucky enough to be born with some modicum of intelligence and into a family that both supported it and could send me to college. That does not make me a better person than her, and does not give me the right to be able to go to the doctor than she has.
When my older daughter got out of college and was looking for a job, we paid for her health insurance, which was miserable and expensive. She didn’t need it, thank Og. My younger daughter is in Germany for the year, and is paying something like 65 Euros a month for excellent insurance. Why do the Germans deserve better than Americans?
My thanks to you and foxy40 for your information. That’s what I like about this place, there is always someone who knows. I only know that the insurance people I talk to aren’t figments of my imagination, but you know a lot more.
Another set of people who are getting hurt are young people, starting out, maybe trying to put themselves through community college. A bunch of my daughter’s friends work retail, and for the most part they are given 30 hours a week so the employer doesn’t have to give them benefits, primarily insurance. A good UHC plan would let them work as much as they want to, since there would be no savings on insurance costs for the employer. And I’m not talking WalMart here, btw.
You don’t understand how the system works. The federal government doesn’t exercise control over doctors or hospitals, and in fact doesn’t even really control ANYTHING directly. Our system is a health insurance system, not direct government control of medical services. The federal government gives money to the provinces only on the most basic of conditions. Provinces can incentivize doctors to move to rural areas if they want, but that doesn’t cross provincial borders.
The administration of funding is done by provincial and territorial governments. Nova Scotia doesn’t give a fig that Saskatchewan’s more spread out. The system would, in fact, work better if Canada was geographically far smaller than it is, for the obvious reason that distance increases cost.
I’m also curious as to the fact that you seem to believe the United States is densely populated. You do realize it’s not, right? In any case, the fact that northern Canada is lightly populated has very little to do with the fact that almost all of them live in a number of very big cities along the southern band of the country. Canadians are not quite as spread out as you seem to think, and Americans are more spread out than you suggest, in large part because the USA really has more practical space in which to live. Canada’s a tiny bit bigger but a lot of our land, no person would ever want to live in.
What would be logical would be to not allow people to move into the test area and skew the results.
No it doesn’t, it just means that you might have to - gasp! - put off the gratification of working for yourself until you have enough saved to pay for a private policy. Or, only one of you quits the job with group coverage. If the only thing keeping you from starting this business is the triple cost of insurance, what are you going to do if your great idea doesn’t bring in money quickly, or even semi-quickly? It doesn’t sound like this has been thought thru, tho it is a great example of how too many people think these days. Apparently, it’s ok to take all kinds of risks because the government will tax the non-risk takers and save your butt. Unfortunately, it seems that the non-risk takers are getting more and more rare.
As for subsidizing CEOs, two wrongs don’t make a right. If it is true that there are folks makin money for no work, deal with that. Without creating more government waste.
(We are talking only medical insurance here, and I know diddly about workers comp, auto and liability.) The facts are - I was told that the doctors offices that I polled did not need any help because “Sally” did the billing, and “Sally” was also one of the receptionists. I specifically asked about dealing with denials, Medicare in particular, and was told that they didn’t get enough of those to make it worthwhile to even have me do them on a percentage basis. Now, that was about 10 years ago, but that was also back when everything was done on paper - almost all doctors visits had to be written up on the particular form that each insurance company used, precerts were on paper, etc.
If this is happening somewhere, you should hope that the state has an elected insurance commisioner and that person should be contacted. It is illegal for an insurance company to not pay for something that is in the policy. OTOH, surgeries that are outside the bounds of the policy can sometimes be approved given a lot of time and energy from the doctors - those would take hours.
Good lord. I see three specialists and none of them have those things. No, strike that, I don’t know about the orthopedist but he is in a very large office so he may have some folks that just do billing, due to the size of the practice. The others, no. If nothing else, they simply don’t see enough patients to be able to afford three people who do nothing but insurance!
As I said way back someplace upthread, I personally think it is because Canadians tend to be more responsible and less entitlement minded than those in the US.
Hardly. I was in the business until Sept 2007. This sounds more like you are assuming that all doctor’s offices are the same as the ones that you go to. All I said was it isn’t true that every doctor has to hire people to just do insurance.
No, as I said in my first post in this thread, and as others who have done more than talk to a receptionist have explained, unless it is a very small practice there is almost certainly one or more people who’s sole job is to do billing.
Oh, yeah, Alaska… Does anyone actually live all that far outside of the cities up there?
I don’t think that northern Canada is why UHC got started up there, but I think it is why it ended up being nationwide. If I remember correctly from what I read, it started in BC and then another provinence (I think Ontario) and then more or less ended up nationwide.
Not reject it, don’t have the option due to their own irresponsibility. Such as not finishing high school (we have a lot of that out here) so they never end up in a job that offers group plans, and they are so underemployed they cannot afford a private policy. Yet they still feel they “deserve” a new car, a nice stereo, 2.3 kids (or whatever the average is these days) and a bigger home. They go out and buy all of that on time and then, whoops!, Dad is killed in a car wreck and everyone says that “thru no fault of their own”, the family is on the ropes.
They force you to buy medical insurance???
That’s what I would want to know, and also the definition of working poor. Take the people across the street. 5 - 6 years ago a couple in their late 20’s bought that house with their two kids, and then had another baby within a year. They cannot afford the mortgage anymore because it ballooned or whatever it is that happens when your monthly payment goes way up, so they moved another couple and their two kids in. There are now four adults and five children living in a three bedroom house, two of the adults drive mid range SUVs and one drives a Hummer. They have an in ground pool, pay to have it maintained and pay a gardener to do their lawn. All four adults work, tho the mother from the original couple either starts really early or only works part time as she picks up the school aged kids and I guess baby goes to daycare or something.
Now, how much saving do you think is going on over there? How much more responsible would it have been to have waited to buy a house until they could actually afford it? One without a pool? To not have kid number three knowing that their mortgage was going to go up? How responsible is it to buy $50,000+ worth of vehicle, and pay to insure it and pay to put gas in it when you are living like that? This is what I want to know - are these the sorts of people that are going bankrupt due to some serious illness? I doubt they are called working poor given the house they live in, but maybe they are?
That has zero to do with it. People who have disasters despite their best efforts deserve to be helped. Those who blow their money, ignore education opportunities, buy what they want when they want it whether they have the money or not - those are the ones I am tired of bailing out.
Perhaps the Germans don’t sit around waiting for someone else to take care of them. Bottom line: the more you tell people that they “deserve” this and “deserve” that without them actually having done anything to actually deserve it, the more the real live responsible people have to pay to make up for it. Eventually, you are going to run out of responsible people.
Why do you think that? The UHC group policy would have to cover hundreds of thousands of people who would not be able to pay a premium, so that cost would have to be made up some how…
Right now we pay about $225 a month for my husband and myself, and that is the most we have ever paid due to him working for a small start up. If we were to add all of the un- and under-employed people to our group policy, do you think the insurance company could afford to cover us all for $225 a month?
This doesn’t contradict what I said since I never said that the Canadian government controls the doctors or hospitals, just that they provide funds.
Sooo, then, logically a country the size of the US might cost even more.
The US is certainly more densely populated than Canada.
People in the US are spread out much more, yes, but they are not as far from big cities as some Canadians are. OTOH, I haven’t been up there past Toronto or Vancouver in years, so perhaps Prince George, Yellowknife and White Horse have grown by quite a bit? It used to be that even in the prairies there would be 100’s of miles between cities - no longer true? You all don’t have the big sweeping wheat fields anymore?
I talked to the doctors - receptionists don’t make those sorts of decisions. Since you can’t seem to accept that maybe things are different outside of your personal experience, I guess there is nothing left to say.
A Canadian can correct me, but I very much doubt the needs of the Yukon and northern Canadians drove the adoption of UHC in Canada. They don’t have a lot of votes, for one thing.
Does anyone actually live all that far outside of the cities up there?