Not like The Gadfly required any additional evidence supporting one of his numerous charges in the previous post that conservatives have been miserably fucking wrong about the state of America's health care system, but you truly need to read this article dear readers --- to gain a clear understanding of exactly how much more worse it is than any of you realize:
Before any X-ray was taken, any blood collected, any medicine delivered to his broken body, crash victim Eric Leonhard was charged $32,767 just to pass through the doors of a Fort Pierce trauma center. • The bill was not for the surgery Leonhard needed to piece together his shattered pelvis. In fact, after exactly 40 minutes, doctors decided to transfer him because they didn't have the right specialist for the job. So they loaded Leonhard onto a helicopter and sent him to another hospital on Florida's east coast. • Lawnwood Regional Medical Center still charged Leonhard, an uninsured tour boat captain, nearly $1,000 for every minute he spent with the medical team that couldn't fix him. • Every day in Florida, injured people face the same kind of outrageous entry fees because they are taken to a state-designated trauma center. • With virtually no government oversight, these specialized hospitals can charge what they want, when they want, with little chance of being flagged for profiteering. • Patients have no clue about the fees until they get their bill. • In 2002, a national committee lobbied by the industry authorized hospitals to charge a "trauma response fee" — essentially a cover charge — when a patient goes to a trauma center. Hospitals set their fees, which are supposed to help offset the high costs of specialists and specialized equipment needed to save the most critically injured. •But a yearlong Tampa Bay Times investigation has found that hospitals are exploiting the fee, charging large sums even to patients whose injuries require little more than first aid.
The Times analyzed more than 10 million patient billing records, examined extensive court records and interviewed dozens of patients.
The analysis — the first of its kind — found that, since 2006, Florida trauma centers have charged at least 120,000 patients the trauma fee. The average fee today tops $10,000; the most expensive hospital regularly charges $33,000.
The Times found that it didn't matter if a patient had a minor cut or a severed leg.
A cyclist with road rash was charged $12,500 in Palm Beach County. After a car crash, a teenage girl who spent two hours in a Gainesville hospital with back pain was charged $9,835. An uninsured Pasco County woman was charged $33,000 even though she only needed someone to treat superficial cuts.
All of these patients — and thousands more like them — were charged more in trauma fees than for their actual medical care.
The collective cost is staggering. Since 2010, patients have been charged more than half a billion dollars in trauma fees, enough to pay the average hospital charges of more than 4,500 gunshot victims or to give every Floridian a flu shot.http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/florida-trauma-centers-charge-outrageous-fees-the-moment-you-come-through/2169148?utm_source=et&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter
The Gadfly is seriously trying to wrap his old hippie brain around this madness. So the way The Gadfly understands this deal in Florida - if you experience an "act of God" catastrophe in your life, such as an automobile accident, and you are unlucky enough to be carted in to one of these unregulated, for profit trauma centers, you can be charged $33,000 dollars by simply laying on a gurney in their emergency room until you are shipped off to another hospital for care?
Call The Gadfly crazy if you must dear readers, but if this article is true, then The Gadfly firmly believes some motherfuckers ought to be sitting in and rotting away in federal prison cells for this. This is beyond outrageous. It is immoral. It is monstrous. And it most certainly should be criminal. And yet this is the system that conservatives keep telling us is wonderful and shouldn't be tinkered with.
All The Gadfly can say is that after reading this article, if you are still of the belief that the legacy, conservative favored health care system from which the abominable stories in this article were spawned from, is the greatest system in the world -- please, for the sake of your family and yourself -- seek out urgent mental health treatment -- for you are simply much too delusional to be walking around the streets unsupervised.
----TFG
No comments:
Post a Comment