Spaghetti fundraisers for $450,000 doctor bills

[jmowreader]

I print a paper that goes to a county which is at least 95 percent against Obamacare. That may be low.

Every week they run two things:
at least two letters about how Obamacare will destroy America

and at least two announcements of fundraising dinners. These are normally spaghetti feeds because those can be done real cheap. For normally $5 you get a plate of spaghetti, bread, beverage and dessert, and maybe 300 people attend - giving net profit of $900.

These folks aren't even trying to pay medical bills with these fundraisers. They are paying rent and grocery bills because the people are signing their paychecks over to hospitals and going deeper in depth every month.

This is what Republicanism has done: it has reduced sick people to begging, while excoriating those who are trying to fix this.

[SharonAnn]

1. Doctor bills? Or is it hospital and medical treatment (like chemotherapy) bills?

There's a difference.

Just lump them in as medical bills and it covers everything. The actual doctor bills are usually a small portion of the overall "medical bills".

[jmowreader]

2. Total medical bills

Whatever you call them, the situation is clear: the Republicans up here want Obamacare repealed because selling spaghetti dinners for $5 per patron is such an efficient way to pay for healthcare.

It is also one of the biggest reasons American healthcare is as expensive as it is. The combination of uninsured people forcing writeoffs and health insurance negotiators forcing markdowns forces them to set prices real high so that once they finish losing money they come out with a profit.

Think back to Sunday's thread about the gout drug they pay $270 to make and charge $27,000 for. They give quite a bit of it away as samples. Some goes to indigent care programs. Insurance companies negotiate the hell out of it. They probably come out of it with 300 percent profit, which is outrageous but not the 10,000 percent profit you see at first glance.

Welcome to America, where we have teabaggers screaming about how terrible it is health insurance companies can only make 20 percent profit. Is there another industry in America guaranteed to make that much?