Medical Staffing Companies Cut Doctors' Pay While Spending Millions On Political Ads (propublica.org) 132
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via ProPublica: Private equity-backed medical staffing companies that have cut doctors' pay are continuing to spend millions on political ads, according to Federal Communications Commission disclosures. The ads amount to $2.2 million since Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31. About $1.2 million has been spent since President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration on March 13, the disclosures show.
The companies behind the ads, TeamHealth and Envision Healthcare, are among the staffing firms that have cut pay and benefits for emergency room doctors and other medical workers. The companies say the cuts are needed to cope with falling income because non-coronavirus patients are avoiding hospitals. Executives at TeamHealth and Envision also took pay cuts. But Envision and TeamHealth have continued to pour money into a joint political ad campaign. Their TV and radio spots are aimed at pressuring lawmakers working to address "surprise billing," where patients get stuck with huge medical costs from out-of-network providers they had no say in choosing. The ads oppose capping out-of-network costs based on median prices in the area. The spending totals don't include digital ads, which aren't reported to the FCC.
The companies behind the ads, TeamHealth and Envision Healthcare, are among the staffing firms that have cut pay and benefits for emergency room doctors and other medical workers. The companies say the cuts are needed to cope with falling income because non-coronavirus patients are avoiding hospitals. Executives at TeamHealth and Envision also took pay cuts. But Envision and TeamHealth have continued to pour money into a joint political ad campaign. Their TV and radio spots are aimed at pressuring lawmakers working to address "surprise billing," where patients get stuck with huge medical costs from out-of-network providers they had no say in choosing. The ads oppose capping out-of-network costs based on median prices in the area. The spending totals don't include digital ads, which aren't reported to the FCC.
But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:2)
The worst part is that many people here think the government should just pay for it. It doesnt matter if a doctor charges a billion dollars to take out your tonsils, just pay it. There has never been a comprehensive plan that tackles all different price gouging. The overpaid doctors, the expensive procedure costs, the overpriced medicine, and quite possibly the most hidden cost of all, the medical suppliers that sell overpriced imaging and diagnostic equipment.
The biggest source of the surprise billing usua
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The biggest source of the surprise billing usually comes from ambulance companies. You call 911 you have no choice of who shows up. Not all companies will take what insurance pays and write off the rest. But lets be honest, $2000 to drive that vehicle 3 miles is ridiculous. If it cost even half that amount they would be banned from taking the rig and crew out for lunch. Yet you always see one parked at burger king.
For what it's worth, here in Norway with single payer system the average cost across 700k ambulance missions was almost $700. If it's air ambulance then across 18k missions it's about $5500 per trip. Two trained EMTs + equipment + prep/cleanup between patients with 24/7 coverage isn't cheap. What mostly drives cost is availability though, here you're supposed to get help within 12 minutes in urban areas and 25 minutes in rural areas 90% of the time. This is not pizza delivery where they'll be there in less
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so if you broke down the cost of all this stuff in an ambulance, why should I pay for the time that crew spent getting lunch? Maybe that should come out of THEIR paycheck? If a 3-5 mile trip costs $700 in Norway, and the entire crew drives 8 miles to eat at some restaurant, in no universe should I be expected to bankroll that expense as a client that was in a car accident later that day. If it costs that much to operate, make them stay at the hopspital / fire station, and they can use GrubHub / Door Dash /
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I'm not living in the US of A, but when I see what people have to pay to get medical services I understand very well why they avoid them. When one treatment costs as much as a person earns in a year, there is something very wrong with the system.
And there's a country where you don't pay for medical services? Which one? Because I live in Europe and a lot is being taken from my salary to get the "free" service. So much, actually, that an American commercial health insurance would be cheaper.
Here we go again another troll with a straw man. All he argued is that in the US people pay too much for medical care he never said not that people should get healthcare for free. Most countries in the industrialised world make you pay for healthcare services, but most of those countries also manage to restrict that price to something fair and affordable. When you can cross the border from the US to Canada and get a batch of insulin that costs in excess of $300 in the US for $30 there is something very seri
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Yet, we have problems with Americans showing up, producing a heath number and abusing our system by using it without ever paying taxes.
There is also a thriving medical tourism industry in America, just heard about a couple going to Barbados for a medical procedure as it was $15,000 instead of $50,000.
Re: But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:2)
I'm curious to find out how often that actually happens. I do know that many people the world over come to the US when they need the best possible health care money can buy (name any specially and you'll find the world's top clinic/hospital for it is somewhere in the US.)
Some people, Canadians included, but mostly Mexicans, will go to the ER for something trivial like a cold, provide totally bogus information, and then bail without paying a cent.
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You mean Americans crossing the border, borrowing a health card and getting expensive medical procedure done? I don't really know, supposedly it was happening quite a bit along the border, and it was believable as the medical card (CARE card) basically just had a name and number on it. You could have easily used my card and name (assuming you're close in age) as the card was all that was asked for in the way of ID, and had open heart surgery or such and there are a lot of under insured Americans and the bor
Re:But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
Straw man? He said "when I see what people have to pay to get medical services I understand very well why they avoid them". So yes, he did suggest that paying for medical services is wrong.
In standard English (American, British and even Indian English), "what people have to pay" is the same as "the amount that people have to pay", not "that people have to pay". It's a little different in some dialects, but still you'll mostly find that it always means the amount and not the fact. Some good resources are available online to help with this [britishcouncil.org]
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when I see what people have to pay
Read again. He said *what*, not *that*.
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Straw man? He said "when I see what people have to pay to get medical services I understand very well why they avoid them". So yes, he did suggest that paying for medical services is wrong.
That original quote suggests that he would also avoid having to pay huge amounts for medical service. Doesn't address paying non-huge amounts. Also doesn't address morality, just whether people choose to pay more or less for a service.
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You also have no idea what anything costs here. I can say this because nobody here knows. You don't find out for months. Could be tens of thousands, could be nothing.
I've been sheltering in place and I'm still getting letters to tell me how much I owe for shit from last year.
Which is nuts because my filing date for my FSA claims is closed so that's extra money I've saved for healthcare and I wouldn't even be able to apply it to my bill.
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Since the wonderful ACA insured everyone and solved the problem what are we even talking about?
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Nah, it never worked in the first place.
Re:But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
A study done at Harvard University indicates that this is the biggest cause of bankruptcy, representing 62% of all personal bankruptcies. One of the interesting caveats of this study shows that 78% of filers had some form of health insurance, thus bucking the myth that medical bills affect only the uninsured.
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You have no idea how insurance works here. I don't have an HMO but many people do and they're more or less forced to take it or pay double or triple for insurance.
If you go to your hospital where your covered doctor practices and you're referred to an out of HMO doctor then you end up paying for everything. So if you're hit by a car and have to see an out of network anesthesiologist you might has well have him put you out of your misery.
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And that American commercial insurer would cover the same things? Somehow I doubt that very much.
Re:But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I highly doubt you are getting $800-2,000 a month taken off of your pay. Hell, I'd be surprised if you are getting even the $400-500 most people have to pay AFTER their employer pays the rest taken off.
Oh yeah, and from what I can tell, you also don't have to spend $2,000-10,000 of your own money before the insurance actually starts paying for things. Or $20-50 every single time you go see the doctor, because the insurance doesn't pay that part - you have to "co-pay".
Tell you what, I'd gladly trade with you, you'd get the short end of the stick.
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And since I have life-long problems with teeth, which is NOT covered by the universal insurance, I fork out an additional $120 per month on average.
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Where the fuck do you live in Europe?
Just that in the UK the average worker pays £1300 towards the NHS.
That's £1300/year. Not each month.
Note that I said 'worker'. If you have a non-work income (e.g. pension) then you pay a little too. If you have no income, or earn under the tax bracket, you pay nothing.
But everybody gets to use the service. The only thing that isn't free is the medication, and that's capped at around £9.15 (although if you have no income, you don't have
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"considering the costs of living, such a lot in life doesn't seem worthy of complaining."
The same can be said for every First-Worlder complaining about the cost of their insurance.
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Yeah, I highly doubt you are getting $800-2,000 a month taken off of your pay. Hell, I'd be surprised if you are getting even the $400-500 most people have to pay AFTER their employer pays the rest taken off.
This is true. However, as the original article pointed out, there is a huge loophole, even for people with no-premium, no-deductible plans. Out-of-network services for surgeries or emergency services can run thousands or tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. That's the lucrative gravy train that the hospitals and out-of-network doctors want to preserve, that the proposed law wants to end, and that the hospitals and doctors are willing to spend millions of dollars to protect because the gravy train
Re:But going to the doctor is expensive? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you don't have are vast bureaucracies that exist purely to squabble over who pays.
The ironic thing is that the people in those bureaucracies don't really care about saving money; what they are really afraid of is doing something where they can be blamed for spending money. If the rules can be blamed, it doesn't matter if the costs go up and the quality of care goes down.
I've had recent experience with critical illness in the family, and insurance company rules actually inflated the cost of care while reducing the quality. When I pointed this out to the insurance drone I was dealing with, she agreed but there was nothing she could do about it. The system is so convoluted and opaque people can't be allowed to do what is obviously sensible; avoiding blame is the paramount concern.
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I've done security for insurance company buildings, and there is absolutely **NO** group of people more bureaucratic and inefficient. Even Immigration and the IRS are more efficient. One place had a guy whose title was 'Software Archivist', I kid you not. Because the only media he would accept was CD we had to burn the install DVD to half a dozen CDs, fake a CD label (because labeling with a sharpie wasn't adequate), fake a jewel case label, and then print the 2800 page System Administration manual PDF i
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You realize this is a feature, not a bug?
Most of these insurace companies are reguluated by what percentage of profit they're allowed to make on premiums. If they want more total profit, they need to have more expenses.
Wasting vast sums of money is how they increase their bottom line.
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Depends on your state and the type of insurance market. Typically states will set a maximum price for their individual health insurance exchanges, if they have one. But nothing prevents employers from negotiating lower prices.
American heath insurance system is only cheaper (Score:5, Informative)
You can google this. We're about twice as expensive per capital as any system in Europe. Those costs don't evaporate, they're passed on to you.
Here in America our employers subsidize our healthcare, but we never see it on our pay stubs so we forget about it. All told my premiums are $14k/yr with a $2500 detectable. That means I pay $16,500 before the private insurance spends a dime on me.
After that they will relentlessly fight with my doctor to not pay or to pay less. This has the effect of making doctor's reluctant to order tests that might come up negative. They call it a "Wallet Biopsy", e.g. where a doctor withholds treatment (often subconsciously) because he's afraid of not getting paid.
I have a family member who walks with a limp because of this. They were left on a drug that in rare cases can damage bones and it screwed up their hip. They needed an MRI, but it wasn't ordered because it might come up empty.
Furthermore stuff like that limp are a "pre-existing condition", meaning the insurance company doesn't want to pay for follow up treatment. Right now we have a law on the books (the Affordable Care Act) which requires pre-existing conditions to be covered. Our current administration is working a case through our courts to get the laws struck down at the behest of our private insurance. If they win re-election the law goes away and my family member will have to fight for care, paying out of pocket at great personal expense.
Trust me, our healthcare system is NOT cheaper. Not unless you're bloody Wolverine and have a healing factor and no kids.
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So much, actually, that an American commercial health insurance would be cheaper.
An American commercial health insurance plan doesn't cover all the costs of care. We have deductibles, which means that the insurance company will pay up to a certain amount for a doctor visit, procedure, medication, etc. Even with really good health insurance plans, Americans are frequently financially destroyed by medical costs. Basically, an American commercial health insurance plan would only be cheaper than your taxes if you didn't actually use it.
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Because I live in Europe and a lot is being taken from my salary to get the "free" service. So much, actually, that an American commercial health insurance would be cheaper.
Only while you do not actually need medical services. The U.S.A. are the OECD country that spends the most, by far, on health service, [oecd.org] while their health service is by far not the best. American commercial health insurance are cheaper the way driving an uninsured car is cheaper than having a car insurance: you end up paying it all at once and you get broken. Which is what it is happening right now over there, thanks to just a flu on steroids.
only if you are not sick (Score:3)
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Sorry, but no, it would not.
FACT: Medicaid, for very low income people, averages about $7200USD/yr for men, and $8300/yr for women.
Meanwhile, my former company (I retired) was paying ->$12,000- a yearr, and to get "gold", I had to add another $2k or so.
"Everybody loves their employer-paid healthcare"... except when they have to make the $1k or $2k before it kicks in, or the employer doesn't offer the same insurer this year, because the insurer kicked the premiums up more than the company could swallow, o
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And there's a country where you don't pay for medical services? Which one? Because I live in Europe and a lot is being taken from my salary to get the "free" service. So much, actually, that an American commercial health insurance would be cheaper.
[Citation needed]. I live in Switzerland, the country with supposedly the highest cost health care system in Europe, and I'm still paying less than when I lived in the US.
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> So much, actually, that an American commercial health insurance would be cheaper.
And how do you know that? The cost of us health insurance varies widely.
Also you've never worked with the system here I have great insurance but it's still hard to use.
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We need changes (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow they are makeing an good case for Single-payer (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow they are makeing an good case for Single-payer.
With that no ad's and no networks + no Drive by doctoring.
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One thing that might make sense, single payer or not, is to establish something like a reserve force (like the US Army Reserves) for the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
You haven't heard much about the Commisioned Corps in this crisis because the corps is tiny -- about 6000 doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. In addition to their regular duties, they're sized and equipped only to deploy in response to local emergencies, like hurricanes or earthquakes.
Wall Street is involved (Score:2)
What did you expect to happen? Now Wall Street needs to own the politicians.
Make regulations insane so it's hard to be in busienss unless part of a large conglomerate (trucking companies do this two ...... why do you think there are inspection stations everywhere.
The only way to be cost competitivie is to be large and to accomplish this you need to have a pile of paperwork for doctors to deal with. How do you do that? Own politicians.
Incentives (Score:3)
When the government has the capability of effecting your business more than the regular market mechanisms of supply and demand, you invest your money in effecting the government. Why bother focus on delivering a better product when you can lobby the government to hand you cash, in one way or another?
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Why bother lobbying the government when you can simply reduce your expenses by paying your employees less?
There's an "ad absurdum" lurking in there somewhere, too.
Ratio (Score:2)
The amount of money you can gain by paying your employees less is limited by market forces (a CPA isn't going to work for you at $10/hour) and the absolute limit of your overall payroll. If your payroll is $100,000,000 a year, you can never increase your profit more than that by reducing pay or eliminating employees.
The government can, literally, create money and hand it to you. There is no practical limit to how much they can make. Also, when it comes to national defense or health care, there are virtually
That's not really the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Private sales work great for toys, video games, twinkies, etc because they're non-essentials, they're easy to understand and compare and it's easy for competitors to get into the market and provide alternatives. There's also a high rate of churn, e.g. I buy a box of twinkies a month and if they suck I don't buy twinkies next month.
Healthcare meets none of these criteria. Without healthcare at best you suffer in pain and at worse die horribly.The average healthcare "consumer" doesn't have the knowledge to make a good choice on what drugs to take, what surgeries to get or who their anesthesiologist should be. You need a decade or more of schooling to make informed decisions. And good luck starting up a competitor to your hospital as easily as you can set one up for Hostess, meaning the barrier for entry in the market is very high (and needs to be or you get quacks). Finally, I might buy a box of twinkies every month, but I'm probably not getting a heart transplant every month. Meaning less churn and less opportunity to switch providers.
Simply put, healthcare does not play nicely with the Free Market. This is why all other countries save a few third worlds have implemented one form of single payer or another.
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the problem is that healthcare is inherently a product that should not be paid for with private dollars.
Right, its better when politicians just take your money and then get to manage your healthcare. A few years ago, the NHS had identified a problem with wait times in their ERs, so the politicians passed a law requiring every patient that enters the ER must see a doctor within some time frame (1 hr? 2 hr? I don't remember now.). So what did NHS hospitals do? Did they expand the ERs? Hire more staff? Of course not - they instead forced patients to wait in their cars or ambulances until the hospital could guara
It's better that we pay into a single insurance (Score:2)
You might make the argument that car insurance is different, since my $3000 beater needs less insurance than your $60,000 Tesla. But that doesn't hold up for healthcare. We're all human. We all have the same kind of bodies. And with the exception of diet and exercise we don't have all that much control over those bodies.
Even diet isn't so clear cut as we find out more about gut ba
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Wow, way to entirely ignore his post and go off on some tangent. "That's how insurance works"? The NHS botches handling ER wait time problems and that's all you can say? Holy shit.
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Private sales worked for essentials like food and property for millennia. It also worked for medical care for a long time until someone decided that everyone had to have all the medical care they ever needed at any point of their life.
Private sales worked when leaches & amputation (Score:2)
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Which is a flaw in capitalism, it is usually cheaper to create a large government that you control then to create a better product.
Humans (Score:2)
It's a flaw in any human-based economic system. Once you start concentrating power, it becomes advantageous to continue and increase the concentration of power. As Orwell pointed out, even in ostensibly "egalitarian" socialist societies, some animals are more equal than others.
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True, at least any large human-based economic system. Unluckily we're a long ways from small, with small being perhaps a hundred people.
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There's nothing capitalist about using the government to get your way.
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Capitalism is basically using your capital to acquire more capital. Many people confuse capitalism with free marketism but they're actually at odds as most successful capitalists would like to get rid of the free market so they don't have to compete and buying government help is one way they do this.
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No, capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services between willing parties. That's it. It's really quite simple.
Anytime you have two parties doing business with one another on those terms, you have some form of capitalism. Free market capitalism lets anyone participate on any basis. Restrictions take you further away from that.
"Using your capital to acquire more capital" is not intrinsically the part of any capitalist enterprise. Trampling all over someone else's ability to participate in market
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Well there seems to be a lot of definitions. From dictionary.com,
Personally I like coops and similar businesses such as credit unions, which can do well in a free market even though not capitalist. OTOH, there's too many capitalists who try to des
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Without government regulations - these same companies would be more than willing to hire armed robbers to make a buck.
Equality (Score:5, Insightful)
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Europeans may not believe this, but in America, anyone that walks into a hospital gets healthcare - if they lack insurance, they'll get a bill, if they lack the funds to pay the bill, it is written off as charity care. Hospitals that refuse charity care risk losing their charter.
The reason we have so many people declaring bankruptcy with medical expenses is because the hospital and the patient disagree about whether the patient has the resources to pay the bill.
One of the main reasons US healthcare is so ex
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Long wait arguments are a sham! (Score:2)
In the USA we do often wait for medical things unless we have a ton of $ and are willing to travel but even so, we do schedule things in a much more wasteful way so you don't wait as long for many things.
It makes sense to wait for something that is NOT critical so that resources can be used efficiently rather than waste a ton of money trying to prop up all that idle time just so things can go a bit faster. That wasteful idle time means you get more choice when to schedule something, which is also an illusi
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Do not tell me the "wait arguments are a sham". The whole purpose of state insurance is to reduce the amount of money spent on medical care. Period. This feat is accomplished by imposing delays. That way the state can limit how much they spend on hospital beds and personnel. Can you fight the government? No. You can complain to them, and some government review board will hear the complaint. And they will do what they can to sweep you under the rug.
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If they properly manage things either system will make you wait to efficiently match supply with demand and that lowers costs! If you want to waste money with idle resources then everybody pays more. It comes down to how it is managed not who manages it! duh! THINK.
People get power in democratic governments by bitching about the government and how THEY will make it better and major $$$ is spent on this. Even when it's good they knock it so you have a reason to replace the incumbent! Private power grabb
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That's so stupid on so many levels. "They may be uncomfortable for a bit longer"? Please.
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No, the reason is screwed up billing.
Most US hospitals have more administrative staff than doctors, nurses and other people who give medical treatment.
Think about that for a moment.
The reason is it costs a ton of money to bill insurance providers - most hospitals have a dedicated department for dealing with insurance and that's one of the largest staffed departments out there. It's because insurance providers generally make it difficult to get money out of them so many personnel are needed to handle them.
Ev
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So you all get bad medical care and long wait times? Good to know.
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I will believe in people having affordable basic levels of healthcare when the people believe that someone has to pay for it, and that it won't necessarily be "the other guy over there".
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medical staffing _companies_ (Score:2)
Companies. As in corporations, who are legally defined as a person. A person with no soul, a lifespan such that they are basically immortal, and deeper pockets than any mortal.
People who take risks, make decisions based on experience and data, and who feel empathy, love, and loathing... that's what makes _us_ great. Not a soulless corporate entity created to limit liability.
Our problems run much deeper than a broken healthcare system.
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Fewer ER patients means reduced need for ER doctors, so hours are being cut to avoid laying off ER doctors.
The companies behind the ads, TeamHealth and Envision Healthcare, are among the staffing firms that have cut pay and benefits for emergency room doctors and other medical workers. The companies say the cuts are needed to cope with falling income because non-coronavirus patients are avoiding hospitals.
Don't confuse an ICU doctor or a respiratory specialist with an ER doctor, the article is about ER doctors specifically, not doctors generally - ICU and respiratory specialists are presumably unaffected by this action.
If an auto repair shop... (Score:2)
If an auto repair shop had fewer customers coming in for repairs, the owners would start cutting mechanics hours, cutting their income - why do we expect hospitals to operate differently?
Markedly fewer patients are visiting the ER:
The companies behind the ads, TeamHealth and Envision Healthcare, are among the staffing firms that have cut pay and benefits for emergency room doctors and other medical workers. The companies say the cuts are needed to cope with falling income because non-coronavirus patients are avoiding hospitals.
So why shouldn't hospitals cut ER doctors hours?
Don't confuse ER doctors with ICU doctors watching over patients with CovId-19 in incubators... ER doctors work outside the ICU, and while they stay in the ER, their income will, logically, be tied to the volume of patients visiting
disambiguation (Score:2)
There is health care.
And there is health insurance.
They are not the same.
Re:Money (Score:4, Interesting)
You live in a country where doctors don't get paid?
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I personally live in a country where the government and Doctors negotiate what they get paid.
The Doctors hated the idea at first, but once it was implemented, they moved to loving it as billing is so simple that they don't need any extra staff to handle billing.
Just eliminating all the crap that goes with private insurance results in huge savings.
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People could have eliminated private insurance years ago in the United States for anything but catastrophic medical emergencies if it hadn't been subsidized by the government as a non-taxable form of income from employers.
The #1 thing that used to keep medical markets "healthy" in the US was people who just paid out of pocket on-the-spot for care. It kept everyone and everything honest. The #2 thing that used to keep medical markets "healthy" in the US were people who had the balls to say "no" to a proced
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People could have eliminated private insurance years ago in the United States for anything but catastrophic medical emergencies if it hadn't been subsidized by the government as a non-taxable form of income from employers.
Perhaps, or perhaps employers would have found that due to buying coverage in bulk, they got such better deals that it was worth offering it to employees as a benefit anyways.
The #1 thing that used to keep medical markets "healthy" in the US was people who just paid out of pocket on-the-spot for care. It kept everyone and everything honest. The #2 thing that used to keep medical markets "healthy" in the US were people who had the balls to say "no" to a procedure or prescription that was too expensive.
Hard to say as procedures became more expensive and offered better quality of life. Medicine has changed a lot in half a century. Perhaps you're right and people would have had the balls to drop dead instead of paying for something expensive
I do not want a panel of government bureaucrats telling me when I can or can not receive care. But I will make that decision myself. Under the circumstances, I do not want to put any money into the American medical system unless I can see clearly that my own family or friends will suffer as a consequence.
I don't want any bureaucrats making decisions on my healthcare, which is why I'm glad not to hav
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So you pay out of pocket then?
And no I don't think bulk coverage as an employer benefit would have caught on to the same extent. Adding an underwriter really drives up costs overall no matter what anyone else tries to tell you.
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So you pay out of pocket then?
No, I simply go to the doctor who treats me or sends me to a specialist or at the worst, the hospital and he bills the Province who pays him. I guess bureaucrats might get involved for something like cosmetic surgery if I was slightly burned for example as cosmetic surgery is usually not covered with exceptions for things like burn victims. Even then it would probably be up to the Doctor whether I should be covered.
And no I don't think bulk coverage as an employer benefit would have caught on to the same extent. Adding an underwriter really drives up costs overall no matter what anyone else tries to tell you.
I really don't know enough to comment. Wish my parents were still alive as it would be intere
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Ah.
So there ARE governments making decisions for you and there ARE bureaucrats controlling your medical care. You just can't see them. Got it!
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Not much different from paying out of pocket where a government bureaucrat can make a decision about whether the money your using is legal, sue the money and confiscate it. Civil forfeiture they call it.
There's not many ways to avoid government interference, especially in America where the courts are used to changing laws. (Think of how many ways the 1st and 2nd amendments have been changed by court decisions, creating precedents)
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In most places a lack of doctors will result in limited access to health care and not paying your doctors a competive wage will lead to a lack of them as they migrate to places that will.
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" I prefer to live in a place where I am equally limited to everyone else and it is not dependent on my social status.
Then you must live in Fantasyland because such a place does not exist on this planet.
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You might want to rethink your statement. "Equally limited to everyone" hah, that's achievable! Ban all medical care. Done deal.
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. . . which doesn't exist.
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Just keep telling yourself that. I'm not going to change your mind. Hard data wouldn't change your mind. You're okay with people "waiting a little while" for medical care because hey, at least they have a card that tells them that (eventually) they'll get care.
Anyone with money who doesn't wait just takes a trip to another country for a more-prompt procedure.
No matter how much you extol the virtues of people having equal access to healthcare, the people with more money get better outcomes. They get to s
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Way to misquote and misunderstand the Declaration of Independence.
The guarantee of "life" is that the government won't actively seek to kill you capriciously. If the government refuses to take care of you when you become terminally ill, it is the disease that kills you, NOT the government.
"Liberty" is self-explanatory. You are free to buy your own medical care or not. Your liberty is not impinged by someone refusing to buy something for you when you feel like you need it.
"Pursuit of happiness" means "rig
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Yeah $2.2m in ads really isn't that much. It's still wasteful though.