Robert, I will tell you one! Here a few years ago I had to call an ambulance for my wife. To transport her to the next town to a bigger hospital, one way is right at 25 miles! We received a bill for almost $1900. At the time the wife was still working for a state contact as a Bussiness Manager and had some of the best insurance around.
When the bill came my wife, who had worked in insurance for about 15 years called them to say their must be a mistake!! We have insurance and you have not billed our insurance! Their reply was they did not take our insurance, except in the neighboring state!
So since my wife knew all about how insurance works and pays out. I had to ask why they would not except our insurance. So she began to school me! If a company excepts insurance they have to automatically be willing to accept right offs. In other words lets say they charge $500.00 for the ambulance to show up! Insurance says the most they will pay is $350.00. So right there they lost $150.00. And lets say they have to give you an aspirin while in route. That one aspirin is the cost of an entire case of aspirin, $35.00. Insurance says we only pay $15.00! So once again the ambulance company has to write off $20.00. So now you are getting the idea of how it works here.
The long and the short of why the ambulance company did not accept insurance is this!! There is no law in our county that says they have to accept insurance, and if they don't accept insurance. You are on the hook for full cost of whatever they want to charge.
We both have insurance, (such as it is) we have to pay for that cost. We have to pay co-pays for most any service we use. The doctor is $15.00, a specialist is $50.00 dollars! An Emergency room visit is $90.00! Now none of that covers services with-in the visit. If they give you a shot you may have to pay for that. X-rays and such are a separate charge, etc., etc.!!
If they say well we are going to give you a prescription for antibiotics. We then go to a pharmacy and have to pay a co-pay on that and it varies by drug to drug. One of the prescriptions my wife takes is over $500.00 a month. She is on about 20 different drugs with her illness she has!
Our part after insurance paid on her prescriptions alone last year was around
$4500.00 for the year. That does not include our doctors visits or anything else that maybe required!! Every year the coverage from insurance seems to go down and the prices up! This year her part of the drug bill is just shy by a couple of dollars at
$4600.00 for the year. Nearly a thousand dollars more than what we paid last year!!!
Our medical system, the insurance companies and the damn drug companies are all in cahoots with our politicians. The politicians do not have the same insurance we have, theirs is the best! And we, (the taxpayers) pay for it for their entire lives ones once they become a politician, even after they retire!!
Our entire medical system is not badly broken, it is criminal enterprise that the insurance companies, the drug companies the hospitals, and doctors use every day to rape the American public!! Since my wife has been so sick they have reduced our lives to, do we eat or do we go to see a doctor or buy medicine!! We have nearly lost everything we worked so hard for all our lives!!
So nobody misconstrues this as anything but what it is,
I am not on any kind of a political rant! This is only one mans opinion. Look at it this way.
I am merely addressing parking in America!!
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