There is very little dignity in U.S. health care system
Dignity Health is a large notfor-profit health care system that operates in California and Arizona.
It prides itself so much on its “excellent, affordable health care, delivered with compassion,” which on its website is subtitled, “Hello, Humankindness.”
It was formed with and by Catholic Health Initiatives so you know it also lives and breathes “pro-life.”
Yet Dignity Health has just proven that our way of financing and paying for health care is unsustainable.
And it did it in the cruelest, least compassionate, least pro-life way possible, by trying its upmost to stick ones of its own employees, Lauren Bard, an ER nurse, with $898,984 in bills for her premature baby, Sadie, according to Pro Publica, the nonprofit investigative journalism website.
Sadie was born at 26 weeks and spent the next 105 days in neonatal ICU at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, and Lauren herself was hospitalized for nine days recovering from the birth.
So it was understandable that she overlooked a clause of her health insurance policy, which she hadn’t read in six years, that said she had to register any newborn children within 31 days or they would not be covered by her plan.
Eight days after that 31-day period elapsed, Irvine’s billing department notified her of a problem processing Sadie’s claims and Lauren learned of her mistake.
No, Dignity told her repeatedly, it could not make an exception, she had to pay the bills.
Imagine this new mother’s stress, or more likely, sheer terror.
Then Pro Publica found out about the bills and called Dignity’s media office.
Glory, Hallelujah, Dignity suddenly discovered that it could make an exception after all, so long as it treated everyone on its plan in Lauren and Sadie’s boat the same. (Sadie is fine now.)
Whew! Lauren figured that at
$100 a month, it would only take her 748 years to pay off the bill.
All health systems and health insurance companies operate the same way, but I can’t help but wonder exactly how Dignity thought a nurse, whose salary it is paying, could have ever paid that bill.
Dignity’s billing department knew she was recovering from childbirth since they were processing and paying her bills, so why didn’t they contact her long before the expiration of the 31 days to enroll Sadie?
This week, the Gallup Poll and West Health published a poll saying that 34 million Americans –
13% of the population – knew someone who died because they could not afford the health care they needed.
Drug manufacturers are allowed to get away with murder – or at least manslaughter – when they raise their insulin prices so high young people in low-paying jobs cannot pay for their juvenile diabetes medication and ration their insulin or do without to the point of dying.
States are allowed to get away with highway robbery when they refuse to expand Medicaid, thus forcing their own poor people to go without health care while their taxpayers subsidize Medicaid in every state that has expanded.
Weekly “hospital courts” have become commonplace in many parts of the country, especially rural ones. These are courts where the hospitals sue patients who were unable to pay for emergency room care or other treatment.
Judges then bring the parties together to negotiate payment plans or they rule that the hospitals can garnish the patients’ wages – even money needed for other things like paying rent or feeding their children – until the bill is paid.
The hospitals do need the money. They continue to close all over the country. When Hahnemann Hospital closed in Philadelphia last month, there were other hospitals in the area to take the burden of treating poor patients, but that is not the case in rural areas.
Similarly, specialists like cardiologists, gynecologists and pediatricians in rural areas close their offices and move because there is not a large enough population to support them, forcing heart patients, pregnant women and parents to travel long distances for care.
Even people who have Affordable Care Act insurance still drive hundreds of miles and wait in lines by the hundreds to attend those two-day, pop-up, free clinic sessions, held in school gyms in the South and Midwest because they cannot afford the deductible and co-pays under their plans. They also cannot afford a $5,000 emergency room visit or the drugs they are supposed to take for the rest of their lives to stay alive.
Meanwhile the drug companies continue to hike their prices and spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to advertise their newly patented drugs, ginning up demand for them by consumers who have no idea what they cost.
President Donald J. Trump blatantly lies when he goes to rallies and claims to his supporters that he will always protect pre-existing conditions even while the Trump Administration is enthusiastically prosecuting a lawsuit that would, if upheld, completely destroy the Affordable Care Act and its protections for pre-existing conditions.
Employers who provide their employees with health insurance coverage have been shoving more and more of the costs of coverage onto their employees each year to the point where meager annual raises simply get plowed right back into the employees’ share of their health plans.
Under these circumstances, it’s not going to be terribly important for voters to parse each Democratic candidate’s health care proposal because whatever they propose will have to get through Congress too, likely in considerably watered-down fashion, and the next Democratic president will take whatever he or she can get.
It’s more important to remember that Trump and the Republican members of Congress, much more beholden than Democrats to big donors like pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and medical professional organizations, do not intend to change the health care system at all except to take it backwards.
Remember, a Republican-controlled Congress came within one vote in 2017 of repealing the ACA.
Changing our health care system is what the 2020 election is going to be all about or should be all about. Pay attention. Your life may depend on it.