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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Explaining the Legalese of the US Supreme Court's Ruling on the Affordable Care Act ~ pj | 355 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Charges for uninsured patients
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 01 2012 @ 06:32 PM EDT
"On the other hand, I have, in the past, had to get a CT
Scan without insurance. When I told them I had no insurance,
magically the price for the CT scan dropped by 70%"

(I'm a practicing surgeon - let me give you my insights on
this).

You lucked out. Unfortunately, it is usually the exact
opposite that happens - the uninsured patients are expected
to pay much more for services than would be collected from
an insurance company. Health insurance is not just "pooling
the risk" - the insurers act very much as a buying
collective. The larger the insurance company, the more
clout they have to negotiate contracts with hospitals and
physicians that include deeply discounted payments. Think of
how Walmart drives down wholesale prices from its suppliers,
and you get the picture.

For years, the nominal "full price" charges for health
services have been an absurdity. Providers virtually never
get anything close to the full charge on the bill. Payment
ranges from around 50% for really good commercial coverage
down to 15% or less for Medicaid. Any hospital will happily
accept a contract that calls for payment at 30 cents on the
dollar.

However, if an uninsured individual requires health
services, he/she is billed for the entire 100%! This often
simply winds up being bad debt, but if the patient has any
financial resources, the full price will often be
aggressively collected until/unless the patient enters
bankruptcy protection.

There is no single issue in today's medicine that upsets me
as much as this one. I find it manifestly unfair that an
uninsured individual is generally expected to pay three
times as much as an insurance company for the same service.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Explaining the Legalese of the US Supreme Court's Ruling on the Affordable Care Act ~ pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 02 2012 @ 07:31 AM EDT
actually I am not. the GOP is muddying the waters about it.

You can NOT get the care these days without the insurance. And the Insurance
Mafioso are ensuring that they dont have to pay a nickel if they can help it.
They call it "efficiency", I call it ROBBERY!

Try telling the minimum wage cashier at a supermarket that needs a bone marrow
transplant that they should have bought health insurance for double their salary
that would have slammed them with a copay that is 5X their weekly gross that!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
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PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )