Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim in CT
"And if, after paying the medical bills they couldn't afford to rent "nice" rather than "crappy" apartments, were they already in financial difficulty?"
No. The family I know, had medical bills that ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not mane people can write a check for that amount and not see a big downward shift in their standard of living, and it doesn't necessarily mean that they were in "financial difficulty" to begin with. They weren't uber-rich, but they were not in financial difficulty by my standards.
I'm not naïve enough to believe that the feds could pull it off without waste and abuse. Nor am I so cynical and callous that I'm willing to say "tough cookies" to people who are so afflicted.
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Now you're really losing me. We need a government program to pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars? If there were such a program, don't you think there would be a lot more cases of such need as exist now? And if the government was willing to pay for them all, wouldn't that even raise the cost of the medicine even more? It sounds like the prescription for more of the same escalating costs we are experiencing now--on steroids.
Wouldn't it be more effective, and more economically reasonable for the rest of society, if the individual negotiated those prices rather than the government either just paying them or instead controlled them.
If your friends could not afford to pay, the medical providers could not collect. Either negotiation or default would occur. Third party has distorted this into a spiral of higher costs, government intervention, and unsustainable debts.