Re: Pearls Before Swine: Uncle Is Not Good With Money

On Mon, 27 Jan 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:

D  <nospam@example.net> wrote:

How much was the cost of the surgery? I frequently hear horror stories
from democrats saying it costs millions of dollars and that you cannot
live in the US due to the high cost of operations like that.

>
Nobody really knows what surgery costs in the US.  You can ask the
hospital for a list price but what they actually charge is much less
than that because the insurance companies negotiate it down.  You can
think of the system as being run by the insurance companies, who decide
what you pay, who help decide what the hospital gets paid, and who decide
if you're eligible for a given procedure.
>
Two people may have the same procedure at the same hospital and get charged
completely differently because they have different insurance, but neither
one is likely to get a real accounting of what things cost.
>
If you don't have insurance, then yes, things can cost millions of dollars
in part because you don't have anyont to negotiate for you.  Go to a
for-profit hospital without insurance and you can find yourself with a
lifetime of debt.  But it can also be completely free to have the same
procedure, especially if you are on an insurance program run by the
same company as the hospital (what is called a Health Maintenance
Organization plan here).   Careful planning pays.
--scott

Thank you very much Scott. Very informative! It does not seem as bleak as some of the more rabid democrats I've encountered semm to think.