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Originally Posted by goofball
Yeah, god forbid you can no longer stick people caught in out-of-network situations with giant-ass balance bills!
I mean, not being about to soak sick people for all their money is just goddanm unamerican!
Here's the problem. For most people who aren't insured thru their employers, the only policy they can get is a very high deductible one. So the "insurer" will almost never have to pay out dime one because the bill will not hit the deductible amount.
So what will happen is that more Emergency departments will close, more hospitals be unable to staff their call panels, and less access to health care for the uninsured/underinsured. We went thru this 10 years or so ago, when all of the orthopods in Clark county dropped off the call schedules at the trauma centers. Since people found the thought of having to be flown to LA or Salt lake for their busted femur not optimal, things were emergently fixed. So we're going to do it again.....
Per a 2016 article in The Atlantic (not exactly a bastion of right-wing politics) -" It isn't that there are fewer emergencies. According to the American Hospital Association, from 1991 to 2010, emergency department visits soared from 88.5 million to 127.2 million. That's an increase of nearly 44 percent. But during this same period, emergency departments closed at a rate of almost 11 percent. We see something similar with trauma centers. Between 1990 and 2005, 339 trauma centers shut their doors." How cutting reimbursement is going to improve things isn't clear to me.
MM MD