What Life Would Be Like In Charles Koch's America

LIke Illinois, you faggot commies.

 

Hospital ER Charges $9,000 to Bandage Cut Finger

Money Talks News By Krystal Steinmetz

A New Jersey teacher was stunned when he received a $9,000 bill after his cut finger was bandaged in a hospital emergency room. Baer Hanusz-Rajkowski cut his finger with the claw end of a hammer. After waiting a few days to see if it would heal on its own, Hanusz-Rajkowski decided to go to the emergency room at Bayonne Medical Center in New Jersey, according to NBC New York. It was determined (without X-rays) that his finger didn’t need stitches. So Hanusz-Rajkowski left with a bandaged middle finger. NBC New York said he was surprised to get this in the mail:

Hanusz-Rajkowski got hit with an $8,200 bill for the emergency room visit. On top of that, Bayonne Medical Center charged $180 for a tetanus shot, $242 for sterile supplies, and $8 for some antibacterial ointment in addition to hundreds of dollars for the services of the nurse practitioner.

That $9,000 bill left Hanusz-Rajkowski speechless. From NBC:

“I got a Band-Aid and a tetanus shot. How could it be $9,000? This is crazy,” Hanusz-Rajkowski said. “If I severed a limb, I’d carry it to the next emergency room in the next city before I go back to this place.”

Why was the bill so high? The answer isn’t clear. It’s more of a he said, she said. Carepoint Health bought Bayonne Medical Center about six years ago, making it a for-profit business, NBC said. Dr. Mark Spektor, president and CEO of the medical center, said the big bill is the fault of Hanusz-Rajkowski’s insurance company, United Healthcare, which no longer has an in-network pricing contract with the hospital. Spektor said United doesn’t offer fair reimbursement rates. According to NBC, Mary McElrath-Jones, spokeswoman for United Healthcare, disagrees with Spektor. “United Healthcare is deeply concerned about hospitals establishing an out-of-network strategy to hike the rate they charge for emergency room services, often surprising patients,” she said. Regardless of whether there’s an in-network price deal, New Jersey law demands that insurers cover the costs of ER visits, NBC said. United Healthcare ended up paying $6,640 on the bill. After the story hit the news, the hospital wrote off Hanusz-Rajkowski’s portion of the bill. Some people are calling for a price cap on ER procedures, NBC reported. Spektor said that would put the hospital, which was once on the brink of bankruptcy and is now profitable again, at risk.

“Insurance companies in the state of New Jersey particularly have had record profits last year. Billions of dollars in profits while hospitals are struggling and closing. That is the real story,” Spektor said.

 

exactly why this crony run obamacare stuff has to stop.

 

Hospital billing practices are an outrage, like much of our health care system. Like greedy CEOs, they will brring ruin on the system eventually.

In fairness, they have to eat a lot of costs, particularly in the ER from uninsured patients. They are required by law to treat them, so they are really between a rock and a hard place. How would you like to be treating someone who has given you a lot of false info, knowing they weren't going to pay but that you could be sued for anything that didn't turn out perfectly?

 

Hence SOMEBODY has to pay, somewhere, somehow.

 

Of course, one of the objectives, if not the chief objective, of the ACA is to move the uninsured onto the rolls of the insured. But conservatives seem to want to go back to the way it was before, as so clearly elucidated by AAA.

Odd.

 

Forbes.com

Pressure is building on states to go along with the expansion of Medicaid benefits under the Affordable Care Act as new studies and financial reports from health care companies point out stark differences between states treating more poor Americans and those that aren’t.

One of the nation’s largest hospital operators, Tenet Healthcare THC -0.25% (THC), last week opened a window into the differences for patients and hospital financial coffers between those states with Medicaid dollars and those without.

“In our five states that expanded Medicaid in 2014, we benefited from a significant migration of patients from uninsured into Medicaid with a 54% decline in uninsured admissions and a 27% decline in uninsured outpatient visits,” Tenet chief executive Trevor Fetter said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call last week.

Tenet saw across-the-board increases in “admissions, outpatient visits, surgeries and emergency department visits,” Fetter said.

The federal government traditionally picks up a little more than half of the cost of Medicaid. But funding under the health law is unlike past efforts to expand Medicaid in that the federal government will pick up the full tab this year as well as 2015 and 2016. The state gradually has to pick up some costs in 2017, but by 2020, the federal government is still picking up 90 percent or more of the Medicaid tab.

There are two dozen states, largely led by Republican governors, that have yet to go along with the Medicaid expansion under the health law.

Political leaders in states that expanded say they are seeing results from the health law and Medicaid expansion.

“The thing I’m thrilled about most of all is that this is going to make Kentuckians so much more healthy over the long term, and it`s going to move our state so far up in the rankings we are going to leave a lot of these states in the dust that are refusing to face reality,” Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, told Chris Mathews last week on MSNBC’s Hardball.

But it’s not all partisan when it comes to spotlighting which non-expansion states are being left behind.

A report last week from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Urban Institute said states that haven’t expanded will “miss out” on more than $420 billion in federal dollars between now and 2022. In addition, the states that don’t expand are losing out on increased employment in the health care industry from newly insured patients who have help paying for services.

“States are literally leaving billions of dollars on the table that would support their hospitals and stimulate the rest of their economies,” the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Kathy Hempstead said in a report accompanying the Urban Institute report.

Other groups have also emerged to point out the benefits of expanding Medicaid. For example, Families USA has released 10 issue briefs thus far outlining in a “Medicaid expansion” looking at “who stands to gain coverage if states expand Medicaid, the types of jobs health by those who would be helped and the overall economic benefit to the state.”

In Indiana, for example, Families USA said last week that had the state expanded Medicaid in January of this year “when the option was first available, by 2016 new federal funds flowing into the state would have supported 16,400 jobs and increased state economic activity by $1.9 billion.” The group also has issued reports for Alabama, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

 

Exactly!