Via Think Progress:
For the first time in a decade, the number of people struggling to pay their medical bills has started to decline, according to a new survey released on Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund. …
Between 2012 and 2014 — as Obamacare’s main coverage expansion took effect — the Commonwealth researchers found that the number of people who had issues paying for health treatment dropped from 41 percent to 35 percent. Over the same time period, the people who skipped out on health services because they couldn’t afford them declined from 43 percent to 36 percent
Both of those numbers, in ideal societies, should be zero, but I’ll take a significant improvement and a massive break in negative trend to positive trend as a win. This type of data is why I have very little patience for people who wanted to kill the bill in 2009/2010 in order to heighten contradictions for something better. The people who wanted to kill the bill as they are either sociopaths, empathy stunted assholes or people figuring that they’ll come out on top so using scarcity and fear as a means of social coercian and control are who they are, but the heighten the contradictions folks wanted to inflict more pain when pain alleviation was achievable.
Mudge
I fully encourage that liberals use the word sociopath to describe Republicans just as Republicans throw around the word socialist to describe Democrats/liberals. Of course all Republicans are sociopaths, but few Democrats are socialists..
satby
I vote sociopath.
MomSense
They were also ignorant so I’m going with ignoranuses.
mattminus
Thank G-d that the supreme court will free us of this anf give people back the dignity that comes from struggling to pay your medical bills. Moops!
Richard Mayhew
@mattminus: Freedumb — or liberterian freedom is for the rich and the privileged… freedom for the non-privileged is quite a different concept and creates a very different bounded option space.
mai naem mobile
I am sure the real reason the numbers of people struggling to pay medical bills is because the Republicans took over Congress. Ditto the Dow having 5 days of down days this week.
Thingumbob (@Thingumbobesq)
Yeah, my insurance went up by 200 per month. Truly remarkable.
SP
I’m dealing with this bullshit right now. I went to urgent care beginning of November because I blocked a slapshot with the back of my finger, waited until morning so the copay would be $20 instead of ER @ $200. Xray negative, an hour later I called my PCP and asked for a referral- to give you an idea of how bullshit the PCP gatekeeper function in our HMO is, you can get a referral without even talking to, much less seeing, the PCP, you just leave a message on their system and they submit one. Heard back that they put it in, that’s that.
December, I get an EOB saying it was denied ($110 list price, insurance allowed payment $61), called my PCP office, they said they tried to put it in (and partly did- the Xray was reimbursed but not the doctor I saw) but that the specific MD wasn’t on the list for the urgent care center even though the entire center was- and not one of these out of network within network scams, his name just accidentally wasn’t in the system. Got them on the phone with insurer, they talked it over and said they’d figured it out and would be reimbursed.
Yesterday got a bill for $110 because it hadn’t been reimbursed, no record of further processing on my insurance company’s patient portal. So now I have to spend another 2 hours on the phone dealing with this shit again, and they’ll probably say that it’s past 60 days or whatever and it too late. There’s absolutely no way I’m paying $110, at most I’ll pay the $61 OOP and try to get insurance to reimburse me directly, but I’m guessing the urgent center won’t accept $61 from me, only $110.
Best in the world, Bitchez.
terraformer
There’s more work to do on healthcare, but we’re on the right track.
Now we should working on mandatory vacation. I don’t understand why pols won’t take that up – the data are clear that providing it doesn’t negatively impact productivity or profits, or any other issue that would undoubtedly surface as arguments against it. It’d be hugely popular.
But American exceptionalism, I guess..
Lee
@Mudge: My go to word is delusional. Since what they perceive as reality and what is actual reality is so different.
They tend to get upset with that descriptor.
balconesfault
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
All that needs said.
balconesfault
@mattminus: Only in Red States ;-)
Richard Mayhew
@SP: 180 days for claims — so they can’t fuck you over yet on timely submission problems.
askew
@SP:
You can talk to provider and tell them the bill is in dispute and they will put the billing on hold until it is resolved. I spent a year trying to get a $400 bill resolved for my physical between the insurance company and the provider. I finally got it down to $200 and had to settle for that.
bin Lurkin'
@SP: They do this because a lot of people just give up and pay rather than dealing with the Matryoshka doll layers of maddening bureaucracy, I’ve had it happen to me, it’s happening right this moment to a friend of mine who paid $1200 advance months ago for a procedure that never happened because an alternate procedure was done instead and they are giving him the very same runaround.
He’s given up on getting the money back, he’s had a quintuple bypass and the aggravation of dealing with it drives his blood pressure up.
Villago Delenda Est
Ralph Nader and your fanbois, we’re looking at you here.
Villago Delenda Est
@SP:
The actual care may be the best in the world, but the financing of it sucks in ways that are beyond the ability of the entire porn industry to communicate properly.
SP
So the insurance company had the claim from the provider, and they had the referral from the PCP, they just hadn’t linked them together in their system because of the initial denial- apparently when they finally got the referral, because the claim was already denied and closed they didn’t see any open claims to apply it to and just ignored it. I got them to do that and they said they’d pay the provider but it might take up to 3 weeks and that I was free to tell the provider this if I wanted. The question is whether the provider will send it to collections before the 3 weeks is up (which would bring it to just over 90 days post-service.) The suspense is killing me!
Cervantes
Good news is always welcome.
Thanks for spelling it out, Richard.
lol
Too little too late, stabbed in the back, thrown under the bus, just words, bully pulpit, leader harderer, dronezz!
Cervantes
@lol:
Tourette’s?
Turgidson
butbutbut I keep hearing from wingnuts that Obamacare forces people to get “coverage” but the “coverage” is too expensive to even use because of high deductibles and small networks! Are you telling me they’re full of shit?
(actually I’m sure there’s plenty of true stories of this happening to certain people – which is lamentable. but the studies and statistics, such as this one showing declining financial strain due to med expenses, seem to be showing that these people are a clear minority. So it goes with large-scale reforms)
Fred Fnord
Or, you know, they didn’t think that it would work as well as it did. Fuck, Obama didn’t think that it would work NEARLY as well as it has, nor did the CBO.
But yes, everyone pat yourselves on the back for being lucky. I’m very happy you’re lucky, too, maybe more than most of you are, since I know a couple of people who are still alive because you are lucky. May ALL of your Heritage-Foundation-inspired reforms work as well as this one did.
richard mayhew
@Fred Fnord: ok Fred, how do you get your preferred policies passed in 2009/2010 with the congress that we had not the one you wish we had
David Koch
but Richard, shouldn’t you obey your progressive betters!
“Kill the Bill!”
“Ten Reason to Kill the Bill”