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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (76665)	10/11/2004 6:05:40 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793800

We already have something in place for catastrophic health coverage. It's called Medicare. To give you an example (I feel sort of deja vu here): I had, as a client, a divorced woman who had custody of the children, and the dad was out of the picture. The youngest daughter got brain cancer and was treated at UVA and ran up horrendous bills. The mother contacted me because she wanted to file for bankruptcy. I suggested that she wait until the treatment was done because the bills would just keep coming in. At some point, I called up the billing office to talk about making minimum payments, and the billing officer suggested to me that the girl qualified for Medicare. Don't ask me how, I am not an expert on this. I do know that the mother had a low income but wasn't officially at the poverty level, but maybe the bills kicked her over the line. At any rate, they transferred all the bills to Uncle Sam. At some point later, another client contacted me and I suggested the same thing to him, and it turned out that there was a shortish window - I want to say 60 days - to get this done. The people at the hospitals should know how to do it, this is what they do for a living. Admittedly this won't be of much use to people with hard assets, but my point is that if you're sick you WILL get medical treatment. But many doctors don't like taking money from Medicare because there is a dollar limit and you need to jump through hoops to get it, so you need a billing office. Teddy Kennedy says 1/3 of health care costs is expended by health care providers just trying to get paid! I have a lot of nurses and doctors in the family, and they'd probably agree. Software is the answer. User friendly, inexpensive, well-designed software. I just upgraded to Quickbooks Pro 2004, and just tried their new program that will integrate the customer list in Quickbooks with the contact list in Microsoft Outlook. Damned if it didn't import all my contact info, so I don't have to type it twice! Hallelujah! I am out the door to buy a full version as soon as I finish this post. Last week I showed my dad how to download all his stock broker data and bank information and read it online. I wanted to show him to import it into Quicken or MS Money but we did not get that far. His brother, my uncle, who is much more computer literate, does that all the time. On the other hand, he did manage to meet a girl who lives in China online, and IM's her morning and night! If my 72 year old dad can learn how to IM a girl in China, and his 70 year old brother can learn how to trade stocks online and make up spreadsheets, they probably could have learned how to submit bills to the insurance co. and Medicare and saved themselves a bundle.