well I understand HOW insurance works, I have had it in the past, but yes that is cool that they cannot drop you or refuse you.DeathFrogg wrote:Actually, if you would have had insurance, that bill would have probably cost around $25, or even nothing. My old plan had a co-pay of $30 for walk in service. It cost $400 a month, but it handled the major costs of a lot of shit.
But it went up every six months. Ten years ago, I was paying about $50 a month for health insurance.
Without insurance, if you got into a car wreck, and needed an ambulance, trauma care, and a hospital stay of a couple days, your bill would probably be around $100,000. The ambulance ride alone will cost a minimum of around $2000. Even if you had the wreck right in front of the hospital. Now think about that, in terms of not being able to work for two or three months after you got out. You think your boss is gonna keep paying that insurance if you're not in the place to pay your half? What if you were out of work when it happened? What if the wreck made it impossible to do your job for the rest of your life?
What if you needed several months of physical therapy on top of all that? Followup surgeries to correct problems that come up?
My brother had his appendix out last year. The surgery used one of those little flexible optical tube things, went in through his asshole, and left no incision. He had no health insurance. His bill was $22,000. For an hour emergency surgery and a night in the hospital.
Now, back to the car wreck. Say you go back to work, and your boss decides that you can't do your job well enough so he lays you off. So you go get another job. The boss tries to get you health insurance through his plan. The Insurance company sees that you've had a major trauma in your history, and still require care from that. They will refuse to offer you insurance, and they deny you coverage based on the fact that you have an injury that occurred before you tried to buy their plan.
Right now, insurance companies are refusing to pay for bills in any case, even if you had paid them for years before you used their system. They can drop you. Just refuse to pay out even with shit they cover in their contract. There are people all over the country who are out of pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical bills, because their health insurance provider flat refused to pay the bills. Medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcies in this country. They can deny you coverage based on a pre-existing condition like hepatitis, or diabetes, or a heart condition.
This is what the Democrats have tried to correct. Unfortunately, they let the insurance companies write most of the bill, so its probably crap in any case. But its something. This ain't over yet.
As for that little black kid, his mother was refused medical care by her insurance company when she got sick. She lost her job because she couldn't work because she was sick, and then she DIED.
Seems to me thats enough.
I see it as a money maker personally, now somone is getting money.