Medical Bills Still Take A Big Toll, Even With Insurance

[think]

26 percent of Americans in an NPR survey said medical bills were taking a toll on their finances. Perhaps when medical bills effect 50% of Americans we'll look at universal healthcare seriously. Medical bills are still the number one cause of bankruptcy in America....

Medical Bills Still Take A Big Toll, Even With Insurance

By Alison Kodjak - Updated March 11, 20162:59 PM ET
Published March 8, 20161:37 PM ET


For Barbara Radley, there is "before" and "after." Before was when she could work — moving furniture, and driving a long-haul truck.

"It was nothing for me to throw a couch on my back and carry it up a flight of stairs," says the 58-year-old from Oshkosh, Wis.

Then there's after. After she herniated five disks in her back. And after, she says, her blood pressure medicine destroyed her pancreas.

Now Radley is disabled, suffering from diabetes, liver failure and scleroderma.

And she is bankrupt.

"Well, the medical bills were just piling up," Radley tells Shots. "We couldn't handle it. We just couldn't keep up."

Radley is among the 26 percent of people in a recent poll who say health care expenses have taken a serious toll on family finances. The poll, conducted by NPR, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, shows that even people with medical insurance are still struggling to pay medical bills....

Read more:
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/08/468892489/medical-bills-still-take-a-big-toll-even-with-insurance

[Dustlawyer]

1. You have said a mouthful!

My mom just got prescribed two new medications. Her part after Medicare and her supplement policy was $95 for one and $400 for the other. Those are not the only ones she has to take! This is beyond insane!

Single payer, if done right, would bring prescription drug prices way down to what the rest of the world pays!

[think]

8. Agree completely. For one of my relatives their largest monthly expense is prescription drugs.

And it is indeed a common occurrence for many Americans to struggle with paying for medications:

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/more-americans-cut-spending-to-pay-for-prescription-drugs.html

[Old Codger]

3. It is common

All over the country, regardless of insurance...The ACA, so called "affordable" health care is not that at all, it is affordable insurance and has done nothing at all to lower actual health costs...

[unapatriciated]

4. Sorry I didn't realize I was on Hubby's account so self deleted Lame54's response

I have been saying this about Health Insurance since 1991.

It does not insure you will get access to needed medical care and you will most likely be bankrupted if you are diagnosed with a catastrophic illness.

I know this from personal experience when my son was diagnosed with Dermatomyositis in 1991. I not only had a cadillac plan through my employer but also had a private catastrophic insurance plan. Still had to sell my house to cover medical bills.

[think]

5. Best wishes to you and your family. Sounds like you all had to endure a great deal.

[LiberalArkie]

10. Back when they were debating Part D medicare, it was brought up about

drug prices here versus the rest of the world. The drug companies said they needed to keep charging the US more because their profits come from the US not the rest of the world. Congress said okey-dokey.

[Melurkyoulongtime]

12. I'm so sorry you had to do that...

I experienced something similar from 1999 - 2004 except it was under Texas' dreadful worker's comp program. I didn't own my house but I did have to give up my long-term rental that I'd considered my home and wiped out my entire $35K savings that took years to save whilst trying to "save" everything else during that time. And of course having no real safety net in this country doesn't help at all. What chaps my heinie is that it really doesn't have to be this way for anyone in that situation in this country if we'd just get our freaking priorities straight

[HughBeaumont]

6. Man, if only there was a way we could get around this . . .

. . . I'm sure some nation out there has thought of a remedy for what ails their people, something about "due human rights" and "universal" . . . anyone know about this magical way?

[think]

7. It's impossible. Can't be done. Don't even try. Unicorns even....

Conservative Think Tank: 10 Countries With Universal Health Care Have Freer Economies Than The U.S.

Many American conservatives oppose universal health insurance because they see it as fundamentally antithetical to a free society. “If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price,” wrote a guest editorialist in the ]Wall Street Journal in 2009. But according to the Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, ten nations freer than the United States have achieved universal health coverage. It turns out that the right kind of health reform could cover more Americans while increasing economic freedom.

Today, Heritage published its 2015 Index of Economic Freedom, an annual look at economic liberty around the world. The United States stayed put at #12, just below Ireland, Mauritius, and Denmark.

What’s striking about the list is that of the eleven countries ahead of the U.S. in economic freedom, ten have achieved universal coverage. Many Americans on both the right on the left subscribe to the myth that the U.S. has a free-market health care system. It doesn’t. U.S. government entities spend more per-capita on health care than all but two other countries in the world....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2015/01/27/conservative-think-tank-10-countries-with-universal-health-care-are-economically-freer-than-the-u-s/#4d9fc5c89fac

[HughBeaumont]

9. And when you lose even a wingnut institution like Heritage . . .

"Many American conservatives oppose universal health insurance because they see it as fundamentally antithetical to a free society" - that must be a kind way of saying "It's more important that NO one gets universal health care than if even one (insert racial, ethnic or gender slur here) gets it".

"U.S. government entities spend more per-capita on health care than all but two other countries in the world.... " - Just like Kucinich once said . . . "We're paying for universal health care, we're just not getting it."

[colsohlibgal]

11. +1000!

For profit healthcare is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Among developed nations we are unique in allowing it. It makes no sense making big bucks on people's suffering.

It is the downside of American Exceptionalism, and Obamacare did not go nearly far enough.