
Avoiding hospital over-charging - obiefernandez
https://www.rickbradley.com/healthcare
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prostheticvamp
I’m too ugh to engage with this at length but just a word:

If you don’t have insurance, go for it.

If you have insurance:

People standing on EMTALA are generally another word for “we are never going
to see a penny for this patient.” Your ED doc does not give a fuck. However,
the hospital will be assigning you a nurse case manager ASAP, whose only job
will be to scrutinize everything done for you, to ensure you don’t get a
single iota of care beyond the bare minimum needed to meet EMTALA standards,
with as prompt a discharge as humanly possible. This will save you money - at
the expense of appropriate care you’d otherwise receive (care that doesn’t
qualify as an “emergency”, which means EMTALA doesn’t touch it, but that we’d
normally do very urgently in order to keep your tuchus alive.) This is the
standard of care random homeless people get.

People have every right to prioritize according to their resources, but if
you’re not worried about ending up homeless, this isn’t the route I’d take.

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phonebanshee
Read the last paragraph first. In fact, only read the last paragraph, where
the author explains that they have zero expertise and are basically just
making it up based on a bunch of pages they found on Google.

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pavel_lishin
Can someone with a legal background double check this for me? "Print out these
cards and present them to officials" strongly reminds me of sovereign citizen
nonsense.

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glitchc
Concur. Sketchy as all heck, this kind of advice is actually dangerous.

Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you sign. If you don’t have insurance, all
amounts are negotiable after the fact. The hospital will write down a $10,000
bill to $500 if they are convinced that’s all you can afford to pay.

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Ididntdothis
The fact it's necessary to write such an article already demonstrates how
corrupt hospitals are. The whole process seems to be full of intentional
pitfalls. If the patient doesn't follow any of the rules (he doesn't know
about) either the insurance or the hospital will screw you big time. Or they
make some mistakes themselves and screw you that way. And it's always up to
the patient to spend time and effort fixing things. I can't find think of any
other industry that gets away with this nonsense.

It's really hard to believe that the country is not capable of bringing some
level of sanity into this.

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chkaloon
The advice about marking up the consent form is similar to the advice given by
Elisabeth Rosenthal in her book American Sickness.

It's not fringe advice.

[https://www.amazon.com/American-Sickness-Healthcare-
Became-B...](https://www.amazon.com/American-Sickness-Healthcare-Became-
Business/dp/0143110853)

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MarkMMullin
Given my first terminal was an ASR-33, this is of interest to me - yes I have
insurance, and yes I have friends who got staggering bills because the
anesthesiologist wasn't in-network (not to bash on anesthesiologists, I have
counted some as good friends and they're the greatest geeks in medicine). -
will this keep in-network hospitals using in-network providers for services ?

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glitchc
If the advice works as intended, why does the author have a disclaimer at the
end indemnify him? Has he tried this out in a real emergency or is this just
armchair pontification?

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obiefernandez
Absolutely vital information for Americans. That we need this is one of the
reasons I don't live in my native country anymore.

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mxz3000
It's ridiculous anyone should have to think about this at all. I'm happy to be
European right about now.

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disabled
I am happy to be both a US|Croatian (European Union) citizen, as somebody with
2 rare immune-mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous
system.

I have tried 10 different treatments, plus combinations of them, with only one
thing working: a blood product that I must self administer.

If the healthcare law gets overturned in the US, I have no choice but to head
off to Europe.

