The medical news website, Kaiser Health News ran an article about a rural hospital in Oklahoma suing its patients over unpaid bills. This is now an old, familiar story in health care. Hospitals, including nonprofit organizations, sometimes sue patients for delinquent medical debts. Obamacare was supposed to do away with medical debt but many people still have cost-sharing they cannot afford.
Category: Health Insurance
Wednesday Links
- Hospital patients do better if they brush their teeth.
- Florida’s plan to import drugs from Canada is limited to state employees. It does not apply to the uninsured or to those with private coverage.
- Google cofounder Larry Page once accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of being a “specieist,” who preferred humans over future digital life forms.
- More on whether AI will take over and kill all the humans.
- More evidence that bureaucracy is no substitute for real markets: “There was no evidence of a differential change in thirty-day mortality among all Medicare beneficiaries with targeted conditions at high-proportion Black hospitals versus other hospitals seven years after the implementation of the [Value Based Purchasing] Program.”
Monday Links
- “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero.” Recommended.
- Most or all of health care spending by people with health insurance would occur even under an indemnity policy – allowing them to take cash instead of care.
- Why don’t people buy their health insurance and their life insurance from the same firm?
- 81 countries have fertility rates below the population replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman of child bearing age.
- From 1975 to 2019, there was a 58% reduction in breast cancer mortality: 25% due to screening and 75% due to treatment.
The Advantages (and Disadvantages) of Medicare Advantage
Traditional Medicare has advantages and disadvantages. Traditional Medicare involves Part A (hospitalization) Part B (doctors and clinics), Part D (drugs). Parts B and D require additional premiums. Furthermore, traditional Medicare has unlimited cost sharing, that runs 20% of the total cost. Most enrollees in traditional Medicare opt to buy a separate supplemental insurance policy to cover their cost sharing.