I'm thinking about letting the taxpayers subsidize me.

.

And dentists too. My son at college picked a dentist, he called and said the dentist said he needed three fillings. I said, just wait and make an appointment with the dentist back home. When he got home the dentist checked the Xrays, inspected and said he didn't need any fillings. In or conversation he said a lot of these young dentists have huge educational loans and they feel compelled to extract as much money from each patient as they can. That bitch wanted to poke a hole in three of my 20 year olds teeth, that would be there until he died. Mikek

Reply to
amdx
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I'm responding to being f***ed by the system, so ya, I'm making a little commotion. How about you paying me the $8,448 subsidy, see if you make any commotion about it. Would you?

Better make that 3%. I suspect at least 1% of them were forced into O'care. Mikek

Reply to
amdx

Sure, it's a free country and they (so far ...) have the right to refuse some plans. Obamacare plans seem to be really bad to doctors, so ...

This was not the point. The point was that the lists all have to be reliable and sufficiently accurate from the start. And with Obamacare they were not.

The only good thing in Obamacare is that insurance companies can no longer refuse for pre-existing conditions. That was always wrong and I agree completely with that change. However, then they went on and even took smoker surcharges out and that's plain wrong. The message in that was: Heck, you don't have to take care of your health, go ahead and smoke all you want. The nanny state will take care of it when you get lung cancer.

The rest of Obamacare is rather bad IMHO, and in the opinion of many others. Well, the voters have spoken.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Good that you caught it. A dentist when I was a kid did that to me and I have paid for that the rest of my life. Still do :-(

It is very hard to find a good local dentist. I went through that exercise two weeks ago when a chunk broke out of a bicuspid tooth and our regular dentist had suddenly closed his office and retired.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Yes, it's now been almost two years and still no sign of any cavities for my son. My dentist recently retired, moved a younger guy into the office and prices are up about 25%. Mikek

Reply to
amdx

You pose as an authority but, as usual, offer no proof to support your stance and, instead, invoke your opinion as if it were hallowed.

John Fields

Reply to
John Fields

You really are ignorant of how the medical system works. It is another example of monopoly. DOCTORS control how many doctors are admitted to medical schools each year. There is no flexibility in supply from demand and pricing. Rather it is regulated by a ***non-governmental*** organization who has a clear interest in keeping the supply lower than the demand.

You have said this before and it is not supported by the facts. Maryland "reformed" tort law (in the limited case of a doctor being sued) so that you could only recover $250,000 no matter what actual damages you had. Did doctor's fees go down? No, they continued to climb.

Certainly this would be good, but it is not the cause of the prices. Making them transparent would do little other than pissing off a few people like us. We have no impact on pricing. It is not supply and demand. Knowing the pricing is not likely to have much impact on your choice of hospitals or doctors.

Wonderful, but Doctors are the heads of nearly every company involved in medicine. In particular they dominate all medical policy decisions everywhere including the US government.

What doesn't work, limiting admissions to medical school? If you really believe the bottleneck is the lack of interest in becoming a doctor by students you have no clue. I was a Chem major and many of my classes were full of pre-med. The only reason they all didn't go on to become doctors was that they couldn't get into a med school due to the limited enrollment.

You can believe what you want. But doctors have always controlled their occupation in exactly the way that engineers don't. We are all lone wolves with not even a pack. Doctors are herd animals who rally together to improve their lot as a whole and have done so to the detriment of the rest of us.

--

Rick
Reply to
rickman

You are ignoring my point that this aspect of the rate is *not* nonsensical. It is directly intended to reduce doctors stringing patients on and produce better results.

I have done exactly that before. My customers don't always have ready money to deal with issues and if I have to I do what it takes to keep them happy. But this is a total non-sequitur. Engineering goes through a process to eliminate bugs and produce good results. A better analogy would be taking fixed price contracts where you end up spending more time in debug (whether your fault or not) than you planned. Yes, I have had that as well. How about you?

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

I don't know why your rates are so messed up. I suspect it has to do with the folks you are getting the numbers from. But I don't see that here. I am finding reasonable rates. I don't see anyone else talking about their rates doubling in three years.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

No proof? I guess Keith knows the obvious:

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--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Let's be precise here: We paid $523/mo in 2009 and now must pay $886/mo, with seriously lower benefits and much steeper co-pays. After Obamacare it all skyrocketed. This is a grandfathered plan, >$5k/year deductible, but had to be changed because of Obamacare law and not for the better for us. I did shop for an Obamacare plan to see if that was any better. Major sticker shock. It would have been over $1200/mo for the lowest level (bronze) plan, around the time the exchanges opened. It's sickening.

The only way many people can afford an Obamacare plan with its built-in age discrimination is to stop working. Which is exactly what some people out here are doing.

So, let's hear your numbers. What have you paid in 2009 and what are you paying now?

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

It is the government telling that they shall not do any follow-up visits. So they don't. It can have serious health consequences for people when bureaucrats play "medical expert".

I never have and never will. My clients pay by the hour or fraction thereof. With me there are no fixed price contracts. I give it my best effort, every single time. When stuff happens like recently where two IC manufacturers failed to disclose some hardcore deficiencies in signal processing chips my clients have to make the decision to either pay me to design an alternative solution or leave it. The client decided to go ahead and fix it. I still remained under my project estimate because I always budget in a buffer for that scenario. Still, the estimates are always made with the written statement that they are not fixed price bids. If a potential client doesn't like it they'd have to find another consultant. Which has become tough in my field.

There are no exceptions to this rule. What we sometimes do with new or financially tight clients is put a cap in there.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

I'm sure you have heard mine, but I'll repeat,

In May of 09 I got notice of a premium increase to $825 for a family of

4 with a $2,500 deductible. I shopped and didn't find a cheaper policy, but, I did find raising my deductible to $10,000 lowered my premium to $376 a month.

05-09 the premium cost to me to $376

05-10 the premium increased to $405 (+7.7%) 05-11 the premium increased to $438 (+8.1%) 05-12 the premium increased to $523 -O'care regs start (+19.4%) 05-13 the premium increased to $633 (+21%) Dropped one kid decrease about $90, (she got her own policy) 05-14 the premium increased $544 to $646 (+18.8%) so equivalent to $736, 646 +90 = $736 05-15 the premium increased to $704 (+9%) again 704 + 100 = $808 Equivalent From 5-09 to 5-15, $376 to $804

Mikek

Reply to
amdx

I get it. You don't.

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Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

We should also have a single-payer food system, and for toilet paper. They're essential. It's the only system that makes any sense.

Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

I talk to my primary care doctor about it almost every visit. He's one that doesn't take Obamacare or Medicare patients because of what the Obamacare law has done to both. He says that among his friends, he's far from alone. It is rather obvious when it's the horse's mouth saying it.

Reply to
krw

What about cellphones, oh never mind, if you can't afford one, the government already takes money from hardworking taxpayers and buys a cellphone for those who can't afford one. Mikek

Reply to
amdx

d-a-doctor/522857/

US doctors are a large part of what ails US health care. "Professional birt h control" means that there aren't enough of them to let market forces cont rol their remuneration, and Obamacare is seen as the thin end of a wedge th at will squeeze them out of their very well remunerated niche.

No so much horse's mouth as horse's ass talking to horse's ass.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Everybody needs food every day. Without adequate medical attention, serious illness is a once-in-a-life-time event (because you won't survive it).

Somebody starving to death doesn't put their neighbours at risk in the same way that somebody expiring of an nasty infectious disease - like Ebola or the black plague - does.

The supply and demand rules don't work quite the same way with food and toilet paper as they do with medical services, and even with food and toilet paper consumers aren't quite as rational as James Arthur likes to claim.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

to solve the real problem which is price gouging for third rate service.

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The government is an equal opportunity gouger. It will take money from comp letely idle taxpayers just as happily.

If giving one of the unemployed a cellphone makes it more likely that they' ll get a job, the government will get more tax out of the recipients that d o get jobs - more than enough to pay for several cellphones.

Precisely how many cell-phones you can afford to hand out depends on how mu ch they raise the recipients chances of getting a job, and the only reliabl e way of assessing that is to hand out a few. Asking a a right-wing nitwit whether it's a good idea is quicker and cheaper - particularly since the an swer is sufficiently predictable that you don't even have to go to the trou ble of finding a right-wing nitwit to ask.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

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