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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (196094)	7/28/2004 9:50:38 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575598

re: Nearly every county in the nation sees patients regardless of their ability to pay. Yea. Let me tell you how that works. A person without medical insurance goes to an emergency room. In most cases they will get treated, but in some cases they will get turned away. Then the bills start coming. And guess what, the non-insured person get's billed at the "list" price for all doctors and services, at least 3 to 4 times as much as an insurance company is willing to pay for the same service. A visit that might cost an insurance company $600 can turn into a $5000 total bill for an uninsured person. The very person who can afford it least. So they don't pay it, and the hospital takes it as a loss, right? No way. They set their collection department after the person. They are relentless. I've seen this all first hand, from a person that needed my help. I've tried to negotiate the bills with the hospital and their doctors, and managed to get a 10% discount from the obscenely inflated price that the non-insured person has to pay, but only if they paid within two weeks, which was impossible. BTW, in this particular case, the hospital never even treated the problem, just diagnosed it, and sent the person home for the home care people to treat. A couple of hours, over $5k in total bills, for a person that has nothing. So when you find those free hospitals, let me know. I'll pass on the info. John

To: i-node who wrote (196094)	7/28/2004 11:53:51 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1575598

>> Where are these free hospitals? Nearly every county in the nation sees patients regardless of their ability to pay. They aren't "free", in that if you can afford it you have to pay (which sort of makes sense, you know?). But they turn nobody away. Consider Parkland Hospital in Dallas. It sees THOUSANDS of destitute patients on a monthly basis, some as outpatients or in the ER, but a substantial number as inpatients. Ignorance is bliss! There is no such thing as a free hospital. Did you not read how they treated the Korean in the article I posted recently.....the Korean who died due to a lack of treatment?! If you don't have health insurance nor money, you are screwed in this country. The only reason you don't know that is because you don't want your tax dollars to pay for someone else's health coverage.