Harp
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 8,508
- Location
- Chicago, IL US
I've often expressed how much I utterly despise the American system of health care, and it's got a lot in common with the way education is overpriced and extortionately financed in this country. Consider a system under which it's required by law that certain tests be fully covered by health insurance -- but hospitals routinely find ways to circumvent that law. A test required to be covered as a "routine screening" instantly becomes a "diagnostic screening," not subject to that law, the moment anything out of the ordinary is observed -- even though the test was ordered by the primary-care provider as a "routine screening" and was treated as such from the moment the patient walked into the facility until the moment she walked out.
Women in the audience here will know exactly what test I'm talking about, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been rooked out of hundreds of dollars she doesn't have by this nasty and very common piece of dirty ex-post-facto. Death to the "health-care-industrial complex."
God, isn't this the truth. My sister picked up some prescriptions for me yesterday at CVS, and the medication
slips list the retail prices, attenuated by Blue Cross federal employees plan cover to a much more modest and
reasonable cost. I have used both private and VA hospital care, the former covered by Blue Cross, and it is a
wonder how civil hospitals legally bill insurance companies.