BANKRUPTCY

February 19, 2019

Americans rely on health coverage from work. It’s not getting the job done.

Republicans got their heads handed to them in the midterms because they bungled a decade of efforts to eliminate public options on health insurance, the House minority leader has conceded. But he and other lawmakers, as well as corporate bosses, may face greater political fallout for failing to deal with a bigger health coverage nightmare for Americans: workplace insurance plans.

More than half of Americans 65 or younger — 150 million-plus — get employer health insurance, while just a quarter of us buy plans on individual markets or get covered by Medicaid, reported the nonpartisan, respected Commonwealth Fund.

Republicans, in control of the House and Senate and now the White House, have ripped at the Affordable Care Act since its passage — although Obamacare has expanded and improved options for those uncovered on the job, including protections for preexisting conditions. Lawmakers in the meantime largely have left alone employer plans.

October 30, 2018

The downside of crowd-funding medical treatments for desperate patients

by Patrick A. Malone

Although the sky-high cost of providing medical care to sick or injured friends and loved ones might seem good reason to encourage community altruism to the nth degree, new technologies that have made it easy, fast, and convenient to “crowd source” online donations also may be sending well-intentioned gifts to dubious and dangerous types of treatment.

A new study by researchers in Atlanta and New York shows that campaigns on GoFundMe and other social media platforms, sought to raise tens of millions of dollars, and brought in millions for sketchy health-related applications. Experts found “1,059 campaigns that raised money for five unproven or possibly risky treatments: homeopathy or naturopathy for cancer, hyperbaric oxygen for brain injury, experimental stem cell therapy for brain or spinal cord injuries, and long-term antibiotics for chronic Lyme disease,” reported Stat, an online health and medicine news site.

CNN reported that online solicitations were targeted to allow patients to seek dubious therapies at “clinics” in Germany and Mexico (homeopathic or naturopathic cancer care), New Orleans (hyperbaric oxygen for brain injury), and Panama, Thailand, India, China, and Mexico (“stem cell” treatment).

June 11, 2018

Will voters recall what Trump and GOP do on health, not just what they say?

by Patrick A. Malone

As voters make up their minds about this fall’s mid-term races, they may wish to burn into their memories how the Trump Administration has dealt, so far, and especially in recent days, with government social programs that have huge effects on Americans’ health and lives.

Take, for example, the late-week, late night announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice that it will decline to defend yet another part of the Affordable Care Act, as 19 states, most red and led by Texas, attack Obamacare in the courts. The legal aspects of this decision will keep lots of law degree holders and their kindred men and women in black robes arguing, heatedly, for a while. There also may be huge political smoke clouds.

But keep in mind this basic fact from the actions by the Justice Department led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions: The nation’s crack legal team is asserting that it is unconstitutional for the ACA to bar insurers from declining coverage due to preexisting conditions.

April 25, 2018

District tests an alternative answer to what really ails too many 911 callers

by Patrick A. Malone

Residents of the nation’s capital will participate in a public health test every time they pick up the phone to dial 911 for help. How their calls get answered says a lot about common sense, as well as the availability and affordability of medical services in Washington and the nation.

National Public Radio reported that a bunch of new faces now will join dispatchers in DC’s already hectic and often overloaded 911 center. They will be registered nurses specializing in urgent triage. And when 911 callers want what they claim is emergency medical help, dispatchers will hook in the nurses who will try to determine what kind of fast assistance might be appropriate.

This might raise hackles: Why can’t 911 dispatchers just get on with it and send ambulances with lights flashing whenever a caller reports an “emergency”? Here’s the problem, as NPR reported:

March 25, 2018

Sick and injured battered by costs of hospitalization, long-term care, bad jobs

by Patrick A. Malone

Illness and accidents batter and beggar Americans worse than many of us realize. New studies show it’s not just the cost of medical services but also long-term care and loss of jobs staggering the lives and finances of too many.

Margot Sanger-Katz, writing in the data-driven New York Times column, “The Upshot,” reported that hospitalization can wreak havoc on Americans older than 50, with many suffering a significant loss in income from which they never recover. This is true, even if they have some financial protection through health insurance. That coverage may soften the blow of medical costs. It doesn’t help them if they can’t return to work, must spend long periods out of work, or must reduce their work hours so they are part-time or less, finds a new study, published in the American Economic Review.

As she wrote:

February 28, 2018

When big money floods into health care, the results can be crazy and corrosive

by Patrick A. Malone

With Americans spending more than $3 trillion annually on health care, the corrosive and crazy effects of all that big money can become almost common place. Even still, hospitals, doctors, and Big Pharma still manage to come up with plenty of, Aw, really, c’mon kinds of financial situations.

Recent news reports, for example, have focused on such dubious dollars and cents concerns like: bedside loans, disparities (price gouging) in cancer care, and, of course, skimpy health insurance plans.

Caveat emptor? Not already infuriated by some recent visual depictions of the upside-down state of costs in the U.S. health care system (see figures*) Read on:

February 14, 2018

Will partisan assault on Obamacare also rack up costs of car insurance?

by Patrick A. Malone

Although Congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration may not want to stop their relentless assault on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, there may be other reasons to persuade them to do so.

Researchers at the nonpartisan, not-for-profit RAND Corp., for example, have looked at existing studies and data and asked if the recent GOP move, in the huge tax cut bill, to halt the ACA’s health insurance mandate will have unintended consequences.

They say the repeal of the requirement that all Americans show they have health coverage when they pay their taxes may “ripple out” to other insurances they carry — meaning that tens of millions of motorists may pay more for auto insurance and businesses could see hikes in workmen’s compensation costs they already struggle to pay.

January 15, 2018

The U.S. way? Rich reap good health, while poor toil in sickness

by Patrick A. Malone

Here’s something that many Americans likely would want to think twice about letting happen: Should good health and long lives be just another of the spoils reserved to the rich?

Vox, a news and information site, has posted a provocative dig into national data on longevity — a measure that has raised experts’ concern with its recent rare, two-years-in-a-row dive, notably due to fatal overdoses of opioid drugs, including prescription painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl.

Experts scrutinizing the data, Vox says, keep finding that “what’s often lost in the conversation about the uptick in [U.S.] mortality … is that this trend isn’t affecting all Americans. In fact, there’s one group … that’s doing better than ever: the rich. While poor and middle-class Americans are dying earlier these days, the wealthiest among us are enjoying unprecedented longevity.”

December 31, 2017

Vegas shooting victims finding tough road to recovery from mass tragedy

by Patrick A. Malone

When illness, accidents, and natural- or man-made calamities strike, victims discover in their long slog to recovery that our health insurance system only aggravates their pain and anxiety. That’s a painful lesson that hundreds of Americans will keep struggling with in 2018, months after a madman rained gunfire from high-powered rifles down into a Las Vegas music festival crowd.

Modern Healthcare deserves credit for its follow-up of the October mayhem Nevada. It was part of what the industry publication calls an “epidemic of mass shootings,” tragedies stretching from San Bernardino, Calif., to Newton, Mass. They’re taxing hospitals’ capacities not only to provide large-scale emergency medicine but also to provide follow-up care — especially assisting survivors and their families and friends in dealing with their staggering medical expenses.

Victims in mass shootings, Modern Healthcare reported, confront a “proliferation of health plans with high deductibles and coinsurance requirements, leaving [them] exposed to many thousands of dollars in cost-sharing. Severely injured patients needing repeat surgeries may hit their out-of-pocket spending limits multiple years in a row, forcing them into bankruptcy. On top of that, even insured patients may face big balance bills if they are treated by out-of-network providers.”

June 12, 2016

Public shaming works, a little, to rein in collectors of unpaid medical bills

by Patrick A. Malone

A despicable element of Big Medicine’s big business has been getting some badly needed scrutiny, with the public glare highlighting how debt incurred due to medical treatment crushes far too many Americans and how reforms are desperately needed. Is public shaming becoming one of the key ways to deal with a horrible problem for Americans?

Kudos, of course, to broadcast satirist John Oliver for his stunt in creating earlier this year an online barebones “company” that claimed to specialize in re-purchasing debt from what he terms “bottom-feeding” collection agencies (see the video). The sums owed, he explains, really shouldn’t be at issue because they are beyond legal time limits for collectors to pursue.