Health Problems

At least around here it happens... It might not be legal, but I live in the middle of nowhere with a shitty economy, where people are happy to land a job paying $12/hr. I assume they don't list "cancer" on the termination slip.

Onigen said:

So pretty much all the fearmongering about US health care costs are only applicable to people without insurance or stupid people who don't get travellers insurance if they go there (it cost me 50€ to be fully insured up to like 250k damages when I was there few years back).

Also woke up with a random damn infection on one eye, guess a trip to the hospital in schedule for today.

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$10k plus the insurance premiums that you have to pay. Arguably the US system works pretty well if you're either a light healthcare consumer like myself (single, healthy, because you can get a high-deductible plan with low premiums and sock away money in a HSA) or a "frequent flier" who is in and out of the hospital twice a month (no offense to any cancer patients; you need it for the most part.)

The people who have it worst off are the "moderate" consumers, like people in their early 60s who need to spend $3-5k total on a MRI and total knee surgery, but don't quite hit their deductible or OOP max.)

You can also get screwed pretty badly if you aren't advocating for yourself and proactively checking drug prices and insurance procedural requirements/what individual plans will and won't cover. For example, my primary care doc wrote a scrip for minocycline. It's 5 times the cost of doxycycline despite being therapeutically equivalent in most cases, so you bet I had him rewrite the scrip. I am a nurse by trade, so I know these things, but most people don't.

People like to say that the US system is free market, but it's anything but; it's a cartel without pricing signals. American Medical Association places an artificial cap on med school admissions to keep MD salaries high via artificial scarcity. Inability to buy insurance across state lines. In ability to compare apples-to-apples if you are trying to shop around for elective surgery. You get the idea.

We also should be focusing more on primary care and prevention rather than hospital care, because it's much cheaper to prevent than it is to treat. Zerocare in theory made some halfhearted steps in that direction, but it came with a whole lot of baggage.

Frenzied Wombat said:

Yeah it's retarded. But look at the "negotiated rate" or "Insurer rate" on your statement. The CT clinic charges 4k, and the insurance company has a negotiated rate of like $500, of which you pay your co-pay out of. Same with blood tests. A standard blood panel has a bill of like $1200, but the insurance company only pays like $125 for it all.

I always wondered that if one was uninsured and you were paying cash, whether you could get the insurance company rate as well, or whether you'd be stuck paying the ridiculous full price.

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Most providers will negotiate a lower rate for you if you self-pay, especially hospitals, because the vast majority of them are nonprofits and can write off rate reductions as charity care.

So I started doing the ketogenic diet to see if it would help my cancer, and my latest tests show that it's been working amazingly. My CT scan shows that all my tumors are shrinking, and my serum tumor markers went from a 91 before the diet to a 5 now after just a week and a half on it!

I'm over the fucking moon right now. We are going to continue with immunotherapy to make sure that it will be gone for good. Who knows, I might have to keep on this diet forever, but I can live with that.

Lumi was right, who would have thought.

Kidney stones are awful, I'm sorry bro. =\