An American Sickness a great recent bestseller written by Elisabeth Rosenthal who is physician verifying how dysfunctional the American Healthcare system is. With recent changes from the Affordable Care Act to the new Healthcare Care, the question lies if the new law even made the American Healthcare to be more “Un-Affordable” paving the way for Americans to be more non-insured.
The easiest way of comparisons with the 2 laws referred to is the normal encounters on our daily living that touches on anything about our health. Such instances would be when going to the pharmacy if one has a regular prescription re-fill, was there a change in your copay, did you used to not pay anything or did your co-pay increase or decrease?
If you have to visit your providers like medical doctors, dentist or optometrist, is there a co-pay changed or are your providers still on the selected HMO or PPO network of your insurance? In such cases if your a the state funded Medicaid, are your providers willing to accept this type of insurance? Sometimes it’s not just a matter of not accepting medicaid, some providers don’t qualify or don’t want to go through the hassle of a long list of compliance and reporting requirements so they can participate in state funded insurance networks.
With the onset of the new Healthcare law, patients with pre-existing conditions will fall under a high risk pool? What it means and outcome we still don’t know at this point. However, what’s going to happen is that these individuals will again end up choosing not to any prescribed preventive care due to affordability or as seen the past racking up huge unpaid medicals bills with collection agencies running after them again. This book discusses on the best practice of negotiating with billing offices when they receive a huge medical bill. Thank god nowadays the credit reporting systems have now classifications and the credit bureaus may or may not allow collectors inundating one’s personal credit file on unpaid medical bills. In spite of this in 2014 as quoted in the book, the Medical and Debt Responsibility Act requiring credit bureaus to delete reports of delinquent medical debt once settled or resolved never made it through the committee due to the credit agencies opposition. And as the book and we all know, Medical cost and billing is big huge business in the American Healthcare system.
It’s still to early to see the outcome of the new Healthcare law but each person must be vigilant on how it will affect each of us and to ensure were not eaten alive with the big business of the Healthcare system.
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