For most of her life, Hope Rubel was a healthy woman with good medical insurance, an unblemished credit history and a solid career in graphic design. But on the day an ambulance rushed her to a Manhattan hospital emergency room shortly after her 48th birthday, she was jobless, uninsured and having a stroke.
Ms. Rubel’s medical problem was rare, a result of a benign tumor on her adrenal gland, but the financial consequences were not unusual. She depleted her savings to pay $17,000 for surgery to remove the tumor, and then watched, “emotionally paralyzed,” she said, as $88,000 in additional hospital bills poured in. Eventually the hospital sued her for the money.
Yet that year the hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, had already collected $50.2 million from the state’s so-called Indigent Care Pool to help care for people like Ms. Rubel who have no insurance and cannot pay their bills.
No one understands hospital finance. The “price list” is fraudulent. It would be like going to buy a car and they begin listing the various parts like head light $500 each. Hubcaps $600 each. Total $150,000 for this Chevy. In our hospital a venipuncture is $55 but Medicare pays $3 and Blue Cross $5. Now if you have insurance, then the insurance company has a contract for a certain amount per disease. So they may agree with Blue Cross to pay a total of $5,000 and without insurance you would owe the ala carte bill of $88,000. The do have a cut rate for the poor but it seems to me to be at the whim of the entry level secretary’s whim. This is the main reason to have insurance just to get the reasonable price they have already agreed on. The HSA plans and the Christian sharing plans don’t seem to have this advantage either. Almost no one understands any of this. No one can tell what the true free markets is. A lot of this is due to Big Government rules. So just don’t get sick if your are without insurance.